Getting Started With The Category Spreadsheet
As the project manager of our ecommerce design team, I spend a significant amount of time explaining tasks or concepts to our clients that may seem elementary to an advanced web developer. Most often, I find myself circling the issue of spreadsheet uploads (primarily the category and product spreadsheets). I’d say 4 times out of 5, the first spreadsheet we receive is incompatable for upload and is either sent back for revision or the web developer consumes precious development time fixing it which costs money. Whether you’ve been tasked with creating these spreadsheets yourself, or wish to more easily explain how these spreadsheets work, I hope this series of posts can help!
The Category Spreadsheet
This week I’m going to focus on the category spreadsheet, as this is the most straight-forward spreadsheet and should be completed first. Other spreadsheets will reference the codes placed in this spreadsheet.
There are 4 basic columns involved with the category spreadsheet: Category Code, Category Name, Category Active, Category Parent Code. Any information in addition to these 4 colums will have to be manually updated or via a module.
Category Code
This is the unique code that the database will reference any time the category is present or referenced. This column can NOT CONTAIN SPECIAL CHARACTERS OR SPACES! If there are multiple words or phrases, use a dash “-” or an underscore “_” to separate. Adding spaces between words is probably the most common mistake on this column.
Category Name
This is the word or phrase that will display on the public side of the website, typically in the category navigation. This column CAN contain special characters and spaces, and typically doesn’t cause much of a stumbling block.
Category Active
This column of the spreadsheet communicates to the database that a category is accessible on the public side of the site. If the category is going to exist, but not be accessable to a person browsing the web, the value for this field will be a “0″ (“inactive”), otherwise a “1″ tells the database to display this category on the public site (i.e. “Active”).
Category Parent Code
Sub-categories are, by far, the most confusing aspect of any category structure. Typically, I see 2 or 3 levels of sub-categories, but there is no limit to the amount of sub-categories. The most important thing to keep in mind is that all categories (sub-categories, parent categories, 3rd degree sub-categories, 8th degree sub-categories etc.), are listed as their own unique category. The relation between categories is created by listing the CODES or any applicable parent categories.
For example, if the category FORD has 2 subcategories: CAR and TRUCK, the category for TRUCK has the parent category of FORD. The spreadsheet would reflect this by listing the CODE for the parent category (FORD) in this column.
Typically, category structures have more than just one level. To use the same example; If the FORD category has a sub-category of TRUCK, which has it’s own sub-categories of RANGER and F-150; the F-150 category would list the TRUCK category code for parent category column.
Here is a snapshot of a spreadsheet using the same example noted above:
This spreadsheet would produce this structure on the public side (unique to each site of course):
You can download a sample category upload spreadsheet here.
In my next post I will show you how to fill out the product upload spreadsheet.
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[...] under Utilities > Import in your store admin. One specific example of these import files is the Category Spreadsheet posted recently; expect to see more blog posts on the other provisioning files. Here are a few [...]