Hello fellow smith cart software users.

I have a smith cart site containing over 5k products. Our main source of product data entry has to be the import spreadsheet feature in smith cart, as there are to many products to update them all manually. We've spent the last week or two trying to update our products to 2013 prices and features. Here is a combined list of all the "bugs, tweaks, and qwerks" of smith cart product import spreadsheets.

I hope this information can spare at least someone the migraine that I'm currently having.

1. Make sure that alphanumeric fields that have all numbers (i.e. sku) have a single quote in front of the them as excel converts these fields to numbers or scientific notation in some cases if the number is big enough.

This should be done ONLY for the SKU field. If your price column numbers are being treated as text in the spreadsheet, they will import as $0.00 every time.

2. If you want to charge shipping on any of your imported products, you must give each product a value in the wieght column. The value of "0" or "empty" disallows that product from having a shipping charge of ANY kind.

3. GET ALL THE INFO YOU WILL EVER WANT, AND GET IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME ON YOUR DESCRIPTION AND IMAGES FIELDS!!!!
Smith cart thinks that if you re-upload an "edited" version of a spreadsheet with the same product SKU's, that all the other fields on the spreadsheet will update. THIS IS NOT TRUE.

a. ANY secondary images outside of the main image and main thumbnail will not update on a re-import. (1st zoom, 2nd main/zoom, 3rd main/zoom)
b. Tabs are ridiculous. I cant pin down the exact cause of this, but it would seem that if any product on the spreadsheet uses a secondary tab (2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th), all the other products on the spreadsheet must use it as well, or it will import incorrectly.

Because of this, one must completely delete the product from the database, and then re-import to have the correct values in all fields. This is VERY problematic, due to the fact that your productID changes. If the search engines had that page indexed, you just broke their link.

YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO IMPORT MORE SECONDARY IMAGES USING THE SPREADSHEET AFTER YOUR FIRST IMPORT. I created a number of images for my products, uploaded them to the proper folder, added them to my spreadsheet, and re-imported. Smith Cart software simply just ignores the changes.

4. There is a character limit programmed into some of the SEO import fields (title, description, keyword, URLKeywords). After importing, check the export of your product database to see which SEO fields were too long, and were truncated.

5. Be careful with the URL keywords field. If you allow a "character return" to sneak into this field, it will break the product page. Here is a formula to check the field, and replace the character return with nothing:
=SUBSTITUTE(AQ2,CHAR(13),"")

Same goes with spaces and so on.

6. The "search term" field is only useful for common misspellings of the product, and here is why.
Smith Cart software has decided it best that it will index for search EVERY word an administrator enters in the product title AND in ALL product tab descriptions.

Let's say I'm selling vegetables on my smith cart site. I create a product, and title it "lettuce". In that product's description I say the sentence, "This lettuce would taste yummy with tomatoes!"

Now - because of that sentence, if a user searches for "tomatoes" on my site - they WILL SEE LETTUCE IN THE RESULTS!!!.

New issue found with product re-importing.

It would seem that product categories, when re-importing an existing sku, are additive - but not subtractive.

Example:
I import a product with categories A and B. I then make a few changes to the product and decide to add it to category C, and remove it from B.

I try the import again with categories A and C.

Product is now listed in categories A, B, and C.

Joy.