Tips for creating and managing hundreds of products
 

Hello everyone. Been an X-Cart user since 2007, however I have only worked on a few dozen products at once, so I'm still a newbie to all the X-Cart features. Also, I am not a guru on any web designing so I apologize for any newbie questions :)

I am in the process of upgrading to X-Cart 5.3 and have just finished most of the design. Now I am working on gathering all the product pictures and create new sku numbers, etc.

I wanted to see if any of you can share some of your tips and workflow processes on handling hundreds of products. Since I am starting from scratch, I want to learn 'best practices' when putting everything together. Here are some specific questions I have:


SKU numbers and Images -
1) I was planning on creating image file names based on sku numbers using a batch photo editor. Planning on making sku numbers based on the category the product is located. Two letters in the beginning, followed by a 4 digit number. Any feedback?

Was also going to resize all photos to 1024x768. Is that the industry standard these days?

2) I was planning on uploading an images folder to store all the photos using FTP, then export a test product csv file, and edit the product names there and link to images folder. When doing a test product entry and upload an image, it asks if I want to store the image in the file server. Is that best practice?


Attributes and Options -
This seems to be the most complicated part of the project. I'm sure many of you started this with many headaches and problems. Do you have any suggestions or workflow tips, especially with handling hundreds of products with these variants? Do you just go through each product one at a time, or use the export csv feature to manage it?

Any other tips or tricks would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, and I apologize if this thread is in the wrong category or has already been answered in other threads.

Re: Tips for creating and managing hundreds of products
 

upgrade to and stick with v4.7.6 is my humble opinion

Re: Tips for creating and managing hundreds of products
 

I like to decide on 4 image sizes:
Banner images
Category image
Product image
Detail image

Then keep them consistent. In my opinion, Nothing needs to be wider than 300px unless it is a detail image and then I would go up to 600px.

Make sure you are saving for web, compressing the images, and experiment with different file types (png, jpg) to see what gives you better compression results.

Re: Tips for creating and managing hundreds of products
 

https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188494?hl=en

Read about image size. Of course this is only if you are going to use Google Shopping but it is a good start too

Re: Tips for creating and managing hundreds of products
 

Thanks guys. I was also looking into the Amazon S3 for image storage. XC5 has a module for that and I just installed it, but haven't transferred the files over yet. Anyone have experience or recommend that as a better option than storing images in the local file server?

I also want to know if the images are transferred, and I decide to go back to the original way, will X-Cart download the files back from Amazon S3 or will the image links be broken. I don't want to guess so I won't do it until I know more.

Re: Tips for creating and managing hundreds of products
 

I've never used Amazon for storage. But I am not a fan of depending on other servers and really anything that complicates the system. I run into enough problems on my own servers and systems.

Re: Tips for creating and managing hundreds of products
 

I would just use XC default. Then use CDN. That way images are served from CDN while still remain on local drive so at any point you can switch back.