Geodesic Solutions Community Wiki

Certain fields in the Bulk Upload process require their data to be entered in specific ways that are not always immediately obvious. This page should help to document those:

The price field is numeric-only, and its numbers should be entered in American-style syntax and without a thousands separator. In other words, "$15564.85" and "15,564.85" are both incorrect – the value in that case should simply read "15564.85"

Precurrency and Postcurrency symbols (e.g. "$" and "USD," respectively) have their own columns, and should be set up as such, and NOT part of the main price column

<tip c n>NOTE: The same numeric-only convention applies to all Auction-type price fields, as well (buy now, minimum bid, reserve price, etc)</tip>

When uploading to multiple categories from a single file, you must specify the category for each listing. This must be in a single column, and can take the format of either the category name or ID number.

Important: When using the category name, only an EXACT match will work – the source file must spell the category name exactly as it appears in the database. Also note that is is possible to configure multiple categories in the core software with the same name; the bulk uploader will arbitrarily pick the first category it finds whose name matches the given data, so if you use multiple categories named the same, be sure to specify category by ID number when bulk uploading. You can find a category's ID number in parentheses next to its name on the Category Setup admin page.

Optional Fields of type "date" should have their date specified in the format YYYYMMDD. January 16, 2012, for instance, would be 20120116

This is a comma-delimited list of all the image URLs to use for each listing. This functions the same as using each of the "Image URL #" columns, but combines them into one column. For example, this column's data for a given listing might read:

"http://mysite.com/images/mypic1.jpg,http://mysite.com/images/mypic2.jpg,http://mysite.com/images/mypic3.jpg"

You can further shorten the required data by using one of the "Base Image Path" settings (see below).

This works exactly like the Image List, but for videos. The data may be in any format supported by the front-end video uploader. E.g., either "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" or simply "dQw4w9WgXcQ"

You can specify a "base" path to your images in one of two locations. DO NOT USE THEM BOTH. Those places are either the "Base Image Path" setting on Step 1 of the upload process, or by setting a column of the upload data to be the "Base Image URL" on Step 2. The Step 1 path setting applies to EVERY listing in the source file, while the Step 2 base url setting may be different for each listing. Here are some examples of ways the two settings can both be useful:

<tip c h>

• Base Image Path (Step 1): "http://mysite.com/images/"
• Listing 1 "Base Image URL": NONE!
• Listing 1 "Image List:" "mypic1.jpg,mypic2.jpg,mypic3.jpg"
• Listing 2 "Base Image URL": NONE!
• Listing 2 "Image List:" "mypic4.jpg,mypic5.jpg,mypic6.jpg"

</tip>

<tip c h>

• Base Image Path (Step 1): NONE!
• Listing 1 "Base Image URL": "http://mysite.com/images/"
• Listing 1 "Image List:" "mypic1.jpg,mypic2.jpg,mypic3.jpg"
• Listing 2 "Base Image URL": "http://yoursite.com/media/pictures/"
• Listing 2 "Image List:" "yourpic24.jpg,yourpic67.jpg,yourpic48.jpg"

</tip>

The surest way to bulk upload an image is to give the uploader its fully-qualified, public URL (e.g. "http://mysite.com/images/mypic1.jpg"). If the image is already uploaded to the local server AND you are using the "Better Quality" (not "Faster") image upload method, you also have the option to specify the local path instead (e.g. "/var/www/html/images/mypic1.jpg")

You may use the bulk uploader to specify a geographic region for each listing. Note, however, that the Geographic Navigation addon uses the core software's built-in "country" and "state" fields for the first two levels of Geographic Navigation. That means that if you are not using greater resolution than the first two levels, you do NOT need to specify a geographic region, but DO need to use the correct country and state locations

If you're using a location resolution three levels or deeper, you need to set the region ID of the terminal region in the bulk uploader. You can find that ID number by going to the front-end page for the given region and looking at the URL. For instance, if you would browse listings in a given region at the URL http://example.com/index.php?region=region42, then you would specify that region to the bulk uploader with simply "42"

You can specify which of a user's storefront categories a bulk uploaded listing should go into. This requires the use of that category's ID number. The ID number may be found in the URL of the given category's page on the front-end. For instance, with a URL of http://cytael.dyndns.org/geo/index.php?a=ap&addon=storefront&page=home&store=50&category=379, you would enter "379" in the bulk upload source file.