In order to sell using BuyItLive, you’ll need to have your products uploaded to your store on our system. You have a couple different options for doing this, and we hope you’ll find one that works well for you. Everyone here at BuyItLive wants to see you succeed, so we try to make our system as simple as possible.
Upload In Bulk
Go to your store on BuyItLive and click on “Products –> Add Products.” You will see this option:
You can upload up to 1,000 products at once using a CSV file. This method is a little more advanced, but if you’d like to increase your technical prowess, it’s not that difficult to learn.
If you use Shopify but don’t want to integrate your account with BuyItLive, you can export a product file from your Shopify account, edit it to match our CSV requirements, and upload it to add your products and product information.
Creating Your CSV File
We recommend following along with this WikiHow article as you learn how to create your own CSV file step-by-step. You’ll also need Microsoft Excel.
- The first row must be the name of the field at the top of the column.
- The file must at least contain these three columns: name or title, price, & quantity.
- You can also have sku, description, weight (ounces), image(s), & collection, variant(s)
Download our CSV template to start adding products now! If you sell inventory from a database that shares CSV file receipts of your past orders, consider watching our 5 minute tutorial video so you can more efficiently edit your file and upload products!
When adding a single product to more than one collection, be sure to separate each name with a comma so your collections upload properly. Example: dresses, summer.
Uploading Images in Your CSV
As mentioned above, you are able to upload images for your products by including the column header, “Img.” If you use the word “image,” or any other word for your images column, they will not upload.
In this column you will add a URL for the product image. The URL you use has to be accessible to the public so that BuyItLive can obtain it and add it to your product page. Using a sharable link from a private storage system like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive will not work due to too many redirects.
Many product images can be found online on company websites. Any public image URL will allow BuyItLive to obtain the product image, but if the image is not accessible or there are too many redirects, you will see this error message after trying to upload your CSV file:
Looking to upload your images to a public server? Check out JotForm, or imgbb, two platforms where you can upload images for free! We’ve tested to verify that image urls from either source properly upload to BuyItLive.
Uploading Your CSV File
After you’ve created your CSV file, you’ll return to the “Add Products” page for steps 5 and 6. For step 5, you’ll decide how you want product codes to be created. Our system can automatically generate product codes from your CSV file in three different ways:
- Use the first word of the product names as the unique product codes
- Use the last word of the product names as the unique product codes
- Use the SKUs as the unique product codes
If you select option 1 or 2 but some of your products have the same first word/last word, then we’ll generate a different code for one of the two products. All of your products must have their own, unique codes.
For step 6, you’ll decide how you want variants to be added. If you don’t have any variants on your CSV file, then you don’t need to worry about this step and either option will work. If you do have variants, there are two options for adding them:
- Each variant listed on your CSV file will be added as it’s own individual product
- All variants of a single product will be listed under that particular product
Once you’ve gone through all the steps, click “Upload CSV File” and choose your file.
Be sure to spell each of your column headers correctly. If there are misspellings, the data in those columns won’t be associated with the products you uploaded.
If you upload the same file again, the system will add each item as a new product and assign an alternate code than what you specified.
We don’t check SKUs, so if you upload a duplicate SKU (not as the product code) you’ll have two or more products with the same SKU.
Questions?
If you have any questions about uploading a CSV file after reading this article, or if you’ve attempted to upload your file with no success, feel free to reach out to us via Facebook messenger and we can help you make the required adjustments to get it uploaded correctly.
is there a limit to the number of items I can add to my inventory?
Hi Janet, there is not a limit to the number of items you can add to your inventory unless you are syncing with Shopify. You can only sync 3000 products from Shopify at a time.