ECMS cats to products

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How to Update eCMS Categories

When CMS products are first uploaded to your eCMS store, they are not part of any categories. Since category association is used to control the display of products on your website, products without categories are very difficult to find (usually requiring a site-wide search using the product name or SKU).

Categories can be added to your products either one at a time manually in the eCMS admin, or in bulk using an import tool. Both options are described here.

Manually: One Product At A Time

This option takes no initial setup time, poses no risk to your site's layout or display, but is overall very time-consuming if you have a large number of products.

1. Log into your eCMS Admin.
2. Click on Inventory and either:
   • Click on All Products, find the product you want to edit, and open it. OR
   • Click on Product Search and pull up the product you want to edit.
3. Expand Product Display->Categories.
4. Select the categories you want this product to belong to in the right-hand window (use Ctrl-<click> to select more than one at a time), and click on the << to make the association active.
   • One thing to note is that if you want the product to be a part of parent categories as well, these must be selected. Using the example product Peanut Brittle, you can see that it is part of both Gifts & Stuff->Corporate Gifts and Gifts & Stuff->Samplers, but not the parent-level Gifts & Stuff category itself. This is not an uncommon setup, but if for some reason you wanted the product to also appear on the Gifts & Stuff category page, you would need to explicitly add the top-level category here as well as the two below it.
5. Down at the bottom of the page, click Save and Close.

Your product's thumbnail image will now display on the category and sub-category pages you have selected for it.

Bulk Updates: Using the Product Import

Using this option takes more initial setup time, and does run some risk if the file is set up incorrectly, but will ultimately save you time in the end. Many of our largest customers use this method.

• NOTE 1: Your file should only have product codes for the products you intend to update.
• NOTE 2: If you are adding new categories to a product that already has some, your import file must contain a complete list of all categoryIDs you want the product to end up in, as it will overwrite whatever is already set.

Setting up the product import file

First, you'll need to set up the file containing your product codes. This is a simple file that can be easily created in Excel.

1. Open Excel to a blank spreadsheet.
2. In the top row, put these 2 entries:
   • SKU
   • CategoryIDs
3. Make sure that both columns are formatted as Text. (Highlight both columns, click Format->Cells..., and select Text.)
4. In the first column labeled SKU, put your product codes, one per line. Each product code should appear only once.
5. In the second column labeled CategoryIDs, put the ID numbers for the categories you want each product to belong to, separated by commas. You can find the categoryID numbers in your eCMS admin under Inventory->Edit Categories, in the far right-hand column (to see all sub-categories, click the Expand All link at the top of the table).
   • IMPORTANT: Make sure there are no spaces between the categoryIDs and commas - if there are, the import will fail!
   • Ignore any errors about "Number formatted as text" - this is exactly what we want.
6. Continue this process until you have
7. Click File->Save As....
8. Change Save as type: to CSV (Comma delimited) (*.csv). Your version of Excel may have slightly different phrasing, but "comma delimited" should definitely be part of it.
9. Give the file a name ending in .csv (lower case is IMPORTANT!) and click Save.

Running the product import

Now you can import the file into your eCMS store to update all your products' categories at once.

1. Inside your eCMS admin, click on Inventory->Product Import.
2. Click the Browse button and select the file just created above.
3. Change the Type drop-down selection to Comma Delimited.
4. Enter your email address in the Notification box. You will receive an email at this address when your import has been processed.
5. The following 3 options should all be set to No:
   • Update Existing Product Name
   • Update Existing Product Description
   • Update Sale Pricing
6. Click Submit.

The email you receive when the import is complete will show you a number of products updated. This should match the number of product codes you had in your import file.

Advice and Hints

• If you have only a few products to change at any given time, it's easier to do them by hand in the admin. However, if you are adding a large number of products to your site, setting up a Product Import file is well worth the initial time investment.
• One quick way to get your product code list out of CMS is to run the Product Line report (found under Reports->Inventory->Products) - just export the report in Excel format and copy the values out of the Product column into your new product import file. Remember to remove any duplicates!
• If you need another option to extract product codes from CMS, please send us a detailed email outlining your requirements, and our Professional Services staff will gladly assist you.