| |
|
 |
Managing TAM products and listings
|
|
|
|
Creating a TAM item catalog of your products is one of
the most useful tools in the TAM system, allowing you
to easily manage large numbers of items being sold on
different sites.
How to create TAM items
To begin creating TAM items first enable TAM for your
free2auction account from your options page, this
will give you a third row of buttons in your free2auction
title bar. In this third row select tam activities, here
you may choose to create a new product from a blank form,
or create a new product from a template you have previously
entered. You may change an items template at any time.
The only required field when entering a TAM item is the
items title, all other settings may be completed as required
and will not be checked for input accuracy at this time,
only when the item is later listed to a live site such
as entering the item as free2auction auction.
The product code is a user defined code which may be used
to link the item to other catalogs, or perhaps as a keyword
searchable field for filtering your products.
Shipping Weight setting may be used to automatically calculate
shipping prices on quotes and orders.
Reorder level may be used to help you filter which products
need to be restocked.
You may upload one picture for each TAM item, this picture
will be stored at free2auction and entered as a
url when listing on free2auction or at eBay. If
you enter a value for the picture url field this setting
will replace any uploaded pictures, if you have either
set you may use eBay's Gallery or Gallery Featured settings.
free2auction offers tools to add large numbers of TAM products at
one time, if you have an external database the CSV import tool
allows you to upload a CSV text file of product information
help. You may also
make TAM products from eBay or free2auction listings using the Bulk Loader
tool, for free2auction auctions select the listings from your selling page
and choose the sell similar or relist bulk action, this will take you to the Bulk
Loader. For eBay listings use the eBay loader and transfer the listings to the
Bulk Loader, from here you may check the export to tam products box and then process
to complete the transfer.
TAM item descriptions
When listing at auction sites the description field is
often a very large and complicated section of the listings
details. A TAM item handles its description in a separate
page and may also be previewed to confirm its appearance
is correct. This allows for handling of more complicated
description configurations that derive from TAM templates.
There are a set of variable strings that may be entered
into a description, these variables will be replaced at
the time of creating a live listing or export with the
appropriate data as follows:
[tamitemid]:
The items unique TAM item id
[tamtitle]: The items title string
[tamproductcode]:
The items user defined product code
In addition you may create segments that are only seen
when listed on a particular site, the supported sites
are free2auction (tag: f2a), eBay (tag: ebay) and
Yahoo (tag: yahoo). To make a segment of your description
only visible to one site use the following tags in your
description, the tags will not be seen, and then content
part will only be outputted when listing to the site specified
in the tag:
[f2a start]
content [f2a end]:
Default, outputted when listing to free2auction
or CSV exports
[ebay start]
content [ebay end]:
Only outputted when exporting to Turbolister
[yahoo start]
content [yahoo end]:
Only outputted when exporting to Yahoo's bulkloader
eBay configuration and listings
It is a common complaint of eBay sellers that uploading
and managing large numbers of products at eBay is a time
consuming headache, especially when working with eBay's
Turbolister program. The TAM system attempts to remove
this headache by offering an eBay configuration page where
you can enter listing details for various eBay sites,
and then export these items at any time to be imported
by Turbolister and then transferred directly to eBay.
Using this feature allows you to quickly deliver sets
of TAM products, perhaps first filtering by stock levels,
to eBay. Also be setting up multiple eBay sites for your
TAM products you may quickly take advantage of site specific
specials, or alter your marketing strategy on a per site
basis.
The eBay attributes code, shipping code, international
shipping code, and ship-to codes are complicated Turbolister
strings that house many variables. These codes are often
required for eBay listings, to find them for your items
you will have to enter a sample listing in Turbolister
and export it to CSV, then find the corresponding field,
copy the code and paste it into the TAM item form. Many
of these codes can be reused, for example if all your
items have the same shipping configuration, however attributes
codes can be more difficult as they often differ per item
and per category. TAM templates are a good tool for handling
eBay settings including these codes.
Due to the regularity of changes to eBay's Turbolister
program the TAM system does not verify the accuracy of
any settings you enter. If a listing you are working with
does not import correctly into Turbolister, first try
creating a sample listing on Turbolister with the values
you want and exporting it to CSV, compare this exported
file with one generated by the TAM Turbolister export
tool, it is often possible to find the differences and
update your TAM settings to correct the problem. If you
are still unable to import you TAM item please contact
the free2auction webmaster
with details.
Yahoo! configuration and listings
The Yahoo configuration for each TAM item allows you to
easily export a set of items for listing on Yahoo! auctions,
either by importing the data into the Yahoo! Seller's
Manager, or by uploading the CSV file directly through
Yahoo's Bulk Loader. Many of the fields for Yahoo listings
including price, duration, and payment methods are taken
from the items free2auction settings reducing the
amount of input you need to enter. If you have difficulties
exporting your TAM item data to Yahoo please contact the
free2auction webmaster
with details.
Listing TAM items as free2auction auctions
You may list an item at any time as a free2auction
auction by selecting the link in the TAM products table,
however you may also configure each TAM item to automatically
be listed on free2auction at given intervals. When
configuring automatic listings you may choose to always
automatically list the item or, if you are using the TAM
system to control your stock levels, to list only when
the items has a certain level in stock. You may also set
the quantity that the item is listed with either as a
set value or as your current stock level.
If your TAM item configuration contains data that does
not comply with the free2auction auction format
the items will not be listed, an easy way to test this
is try manually listing the item to free2auction
first.
Listing TAM items as a free2auction store item
A TAM item may be linked directly to one free2auction
store item, do this by entering the store item id in the
TAM item details page or by select the link in the details
page to list the item as a free2auction store item,
which will create the store item and attach it to the
TAM item. You may remove a store item from being linked
to a TAM item at any time by removing the store item id
from the TAM item details page.
When a store item is linked to a TAM item you may configure
your TAM account to automatically create new TAM customers
and new TAM orders when purchases are made, and to automatically
update the store items available quantity as your TAM
items stock changes.
Updating TAM items
You may enter an individual TAM items configuration pages
by clicking on the items title in any TAM system page,
the most common place to do this is from the TAM products
table which allows you to search
your catalog by a combination of various filters including
title, category, have stock etc..
In addition to individual updates you may edit items in
bulk from the TAM products table. First check a selection
of the items you wish to edit and from the bulk actions
choose edit, edit desc (description), or edit ebaysite.
These bulk edit tools work on one field at a time and
allow you to perform a range of alterations to that field,
such as overwriting all data, replacing text strings in
titles and descriptions, or performing arithmetic on price
fields.
If a variable is controlled by a template then you will
not be able to alter it using the bulk tools. If you are
editing bulk TAM item descriptions and your selected TAM
items have multiple description sections passed down from
parent templates then you must select which section you
are performing the update on, if some of the items do
not contain a compatible section as that chosen then the
update will not be performed on them.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
