If your Catalogue Association File fails to upload, or it does not achieve the desired results, please follow these steps to ensure it has been configured correctly.
If after that it is still not working, please contact support.
Product Options vs. Product Addons
Product Options
Product Options are used when you have a set of products you wish to group together to display for customers (e.g. different sizes for the one product).
To first set this up, a few requirements must be met.
- One of the products is defined as the 'parent product' (generally the smallest or largest) OR a dummy parent product is created in your accounting system
- The parent product's Item Name, Description and Brand are made generic to cover each of the child products
- An accounting system field is created to contain the size data displayed against the parent product (can either be in a drop down menu or displayed separately)
- A Catalogue Association File is filled out, linking the Parent Product to the Child Products
- This must be correctly filled in with Excel using this layout and saved as a Tab Delimited text file
- An example can be found below
| ParentProductCode | ChildProductCode | Type | ChildPriority |
|---|---|---|---|
| PRODUCT | PRODUCT_1 | option | 90 |
| PRODUCT | PRODUCT_2 | option | 80 |
| PRODUCT | PRODUCT_3 | option | 70 |
Note: If using Product Options, set the “Child Products” to “Hidden” in CatalogueLINK so that these products do not appear on the website both against the parent and separately
Note: The child product with the highest ChildPriority will appear first
Product Addons
Product Addons are used if you want to display a Related Products section on your product pages to cross promote related items.
To set this up a Catalogue Association File is filled out:
- In this scenario, the product page you want the related products to appear on is the Parent Product and the products appearing in the related products section are the Child Products
- This must be correctly filled in with Excel using this layout and saved as a Tab Delimited text file
- An example can be found below
| ParentProductCode | ChildProductCode | Type | ChildPriority |
|---|---|---|---|
| APPLE | ORANGE | addon | 90 |
| APPLE | PEAR | addon | 80 |
| APPLE | BANANA | addon | 70 |
Note: The child product with the highest ChildPriority will appear first
Properly Formatting the File
Before uploading the Catalogue Association File to the website, see User Guide, you must first ensure the file is formatted correctly.
- Once you have finished entering in your associations in Excel, save the file as a Tab Delimited Text File
- Open your association file in Notepad (or similar text editor) and try to highlight everything
- If your file appears as the example below, it is ready to upload:
- If you can highlight extra lines in Notepad, it is not ready to upload:
- This can be caused by not properly clearing unused cells in Excel
- Once these extra lines are cleared from the file it is ready to be uploaded