Instructions for Creating an Inventory Export File for use with a Website
Visual Jewelry Shopkeeper has a "Universal" web export feature to create inventory data files in various formats that are suitable for your web manager to upload and to import into any website.
For users with the Maintenance Plan, more recent versions of Shopkeeper can also upload to your web server these prepared inventory export lists and image files, provided your web server accepts FTP uploads. See the Web Export FTP upload instructions page for more details.
Start with a sample export with a relatively short number of records and send the web managers the result so that they can review it and determine how to fit the data coming from Shopkeeper onto the pages of your website. (E.g. export the inventory of just one major class code for the initial test.)
Your website manager will need to work with you to help you select the right data fields to select from Shopkeeper and how to select the right file format to use and then how to best match the data available from Shopkeeper to the website. Initially, that can take a certain amount of time, and they might even try to make you figure it out or ask you to ask someone else to figure it out - but organizing data for the website is the essential part of their job!
After the right format and process have been established, continued updates are semi-automatic.
Inventory exports suitable for websites are done via Inventory Reports by Style on the Reports Menu.
Choose the criteria for the section of inventory you want to export, click Full Selection and check Web Export and Config Export.
Note: Once the configuration part of this has been tweaked to work with your website, you do not have to do that step every time. Also you shoudl consider saving a Memorize Report report which you can re-use many times to quickly select and re-use a combination of selection criteria.
One criterion that you may not have seen before is the Only w/Alt. Desc option, which is worth reviewing with the notes below.
Config Export allows you to select: a) Which fields you want included; b) Preferred names for the exported field. (Not that the export field names always matter.)
See the Configure Website Export Format help topic for details on customizing the layout of the export file.
This creates files called InvStyleExport in Excel XLS format as well as CSV, XML and Tab Delimited and Pipe Delimited formats. By default, the export files are put in the Inv-Web-Export folder which is in the VJS Reports folder which is on the Windows Desktop.
Note that the CSV option is a more recent addition. Previously, CSV was specifically not included as an option because CSV files generally include text information surrounded with quote marks. However, inventory descriptions do sometimes include embedded quote marks, such as for inches, and this can cause data problems in CSV files.
Because CSV is a fairly commonly used format, it has now been added, but to avoid the embedded quote mark ambiguity, it would be better if the web manager can accept files in XLS or XML format, or possibly the Pipe Delimited TXT file.
If you choose Quiet instead of Yes for the Web Export option, then there are fewer information and question prompts during the preparation of the inventory data and image files.
In terms of uploading the images to your website, you could export all the images from your \VISUALJS\DATA\MAIN\IMAGES folder.
[The MAIN part of the folder path above may be different for your data set.]
Your web or network person might set up an "FTP synch program" to automatically send any new images to your website - perhaps daily or all day.
More recent versions of VJS have an extra option to export picture files when you run the inventory web export option.
I.e. if you make a selection that creates an XML or XLS file of 100 new items, at the same time, VJS can copy the related picture files to a 'staging' folder which can make it easier to upload them to your website.
Or - if you choose all items in stock, you'd get all corresponding pictures.
Note that if you have many thousands of images, the first time you upload them all could take hours. Subsequent uploads should be much faster if only the new pictures are uploaded.
If you choose the Export Images option from the Full Selection screen of the Inventory Reports by Style. The copies of the image files are put in the Image-Export folder which is inside the Inv-Web-Export folder which is in the VJS Reports folder which is on the Windows Desktop. This picture copy option is off by default.
Only w/Alt. Desc export selection option:
Also see the Web Category and Web Status help topic for more details.
On the inventory status screen is a tab called Style Det. which access a page of inventory details that are shared by all Sku's of the same style.
For example, you may have stocked Style 123K from Vendor G&D several times and each restock got a new Sku number. Each Sku may have a slightly different cost and price and even a slightly different description. Changing the description of one Sku does not change the description of the other Sku's.
However, the information on the Style Details page is a shared by all Sku's of the same style. There is a Notes box, an Alternative/Web Description a Web Status and Web Category.
You do not have to fill in any of these in order to export; however, for your website you may want to enter a description differently than for use in-store, in which case you can use these boxes.
The Web Status and Web Category boxes currently don't have any pre-defined meaning but you can fill them in with "codes" that might help your website handle those items differently.
There are innumerable possible uses, but for a simple example, one code might indicate that it "takes extra time to ship", or "only available in store" or "unique item" (un-restockable) or "not discountable."
Another use for the Alternative Web Description is that you can make the export feature select only those items that have such an alternative description.
I.e. filling in the Alternative Web Description is one way you can select which items you want to be sent to the web or which items to be *excluded*
Note that you don't even have to export or use the Alternative Description on your website: You could type the letter X in the Alternative Description of the items you want to export, yet in the Export file and on your website you could include just the normal (Sku) description and normal notes.