I'm not sure what these are called

[australisagencies]

Hi all,

I'm hoping for a little guidance as to what the functions I'm looking for are called. I can read up and practise on using them, but of course any further detail is most welcome!

First, a little background. I have a business distributing (re-selling) B2B apparel, PPE, promotional merchandise, signage and printed items. So those will be my major categories. I have a lot of different wholesalers, who only deal with distributors like me. I (generally) don't hold stock.

The suppliers have CSV files for uploading, and from importing a couple of them I can see that it's a mess. Are there any top tips for managing this?

I have decided on my layout with the above categories as the major groupings (is this a "root category"?) and I'll subdivide from there. I was manually creating categories, but I have a million of them. Can anyone please guide me to the reading for category importing?

Is there a way I can upload my cost pricing and have the site dynamically apply margins from there? Ideally I'd like a consistent sitewide margin, then apply discounts based on spend at the checkout. Supplementary question, is there a best way to update pricing only with a CSV upload, as my vendors raise prices? Also re updates, when a supplier adds or deletes products? Also re updates, some suppliers have RSS feeds, too. This sounds like a great option - can anyone point me in the right direction, please? Quantity breaks - nearly all of my suppliers have quantity breaks in pricing. How do I implement this? Can it be done at the product creation stage by bulk import? Attributes - can I bulk upload these, too? And how can I associate a product with attributes later, without doing them individually? I will end up with thousands of products.

Most of my competitors haven't bothered to implement a web store, presumably because there are so many products to set up. It's usually high margin and direct service. I want to compete on price, so I need the store implemented and to let prospects browse and compare. But I intend to market more widely than direct calls to clients, and publish sales and specials and use the internet for prospecting rather than the phone.

A couple of scenarios:

Apparel - high-vis workwear with various colours, with and without reflective tape, in various sizes. Usually no quantity breaks, but will have free freight above a certain spend (varying with the supplier).

Promotional - say pens. Will have various colours per model, decoration options will be pad-print or laser engrave (decorations have a setup charge then per-item charge), will have quantity/price brackets, will have free freight above a certain spend (varying with the supplier).

I think that's enough questions for now!

Thanks very much for any guidance.

[australisagencies]

Update - I've found the various upload templates... can't believe I missed them.

[australisagencies]

Can admin please delete this RTFM post?