Managing products with Catalog Manager is now faster and easier

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by Jennifer Farwell

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Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Over the last week and a half, we’ve been releasing updates to Catalog Manager, with a phased rollout to different sets of stores. Early this morning, the rollout was completed with the updates released to all stores.

Next time you’re in your Store Manager, I encourage you to click on the "Catalog Manager" link and have a look around at what’s new. The updates we’ve made are as a result of the feedback we’ve heard from you, our merchants. Many of the enhancements and new options come from the requests and suggestions you’ve had for features that will make daily tasks such as locating, filtering, and updating products faster for you to do, and can make managing your product catalog easier and more efficient.

Here’s a look at what’s new in Catalog Manager.

Advanced search

Merchants have often told us that they’d like to have an easy way to find products in their catalog matching certain criteria, such as products below a certain price that are also a certain brand. The new advanced search feature lets you do just that. While quick search lets you locate products in a single table, or across all tables, advanced search lets you apply attribute and condition filters individually or in combination to one or more tables.

So if you wanted to find products in your catalog like in the example above, you can apply brand and price filters to all tables, or a few of your tables, or a single table, and quickly get the results you’re looking for.

Get help with advanced search.

Easily locate products matching certain criteria using the advanced search feature.

Filtered catalog downloads

Filtered catalog downloads can save you time searching through or sorting spreadsheets with numerous products. Now when you perform a quick search or advanced search of your catalog, you can download the filtered list of products in .csv format, rather than all products in a table. For example, if you would like to apply a discount to all products in your store of a certain brand, you can perform a search for these products (e.g. search by brand using advanced search filters, or perform a wild card search by ID, code, or name, if the products of this brand in your catalog begin or end with the same set of characters). Once Catalog Manager has returned a list of matching products, simply click the "Download" icon located to the top right of the search results to download a list of these products.

More editing options

We’ve also made it more efficient for merchants who don’t update their catalogs using the upload feature to make the same changes to multiple products, without having to open all products in a table for editing to change individual attributes, or to edit products one at a time. If you have multiple products you’d like to make the same update to, you can use the new "Edit Selected" option to make updates to only the products you’ve selected.

If you’d like to apply a discount to a few of your products, or to make other changes to all of the selected products at the same time, you can do this by selecting products in a table using the product checkboxes, clicking the "Edit Selected" button, and making changes to product attributes on the "Edit Selected Products" page.

Make the same changes to multiple products using the "Edit Selected" option.

Note: When you use the "Edit Selected" option, the changes you make to attributes on the "Edit Selected Products" page will be applied to all selected products. For example, if you selected three products on the Manage Products page using the product checkboxes, and then clicked "Edit Selected," the changes you make will be applied to all three of those products.

Changes made using the "Edit Selected Products" page will be applied to all selected products.

The "Edit All" option replaces the former "Edit These Items" option, letting you open all items displayed onscreen for easy editing. And, as always, you may edit products one at a time by clicking on a linked product ID when viewing your product tables.

Learn more about editing your products.

Products open for editing using the "Edit All" option.

Product editing directly from search results

When you perform quick searches or advanced searches, you can edit the products returned directly from the list of search results. When using quick search, you can edit products individually, using the "Edit Selected" option, or you can open all products displayed onscreen for editing using the "Edit All" option. When using advanced search, you can edit products individually or using the "Edit All" option. You may also delete products listed in the search results from your catalog by selecting products using the product checkboxes, and clicking the "Delete" button.

More details about unpublished and published changes

The Publish tab now includes an unpublished changes log, allowing you to review details about what changes have been made to your catalog since your last publish, the date a change was made on, and the ID of the user who made the change. Reviewing your unpublished changes log before publishing your catalog is recommended, to help you avoid publishing unwanted changes you may have forgotten about, may not have been aware of, or didn’t intend to make.

Unpublished changes log in Catalog Manager

The publish history in the Publish tab now includes a greater amount of detail about the changes to your catalog that have been published. Along with the date a publish was performed and the ID of the user who performed the publish, you can also see information about the changes that were published, the date those changes were made to your catalog prior to being published, and the ID of the user who made each change.

To see and use these updates, you can sign into your Store Manager and click the "Catalog Manager" link. If you want to learn more before getting started, check out our online help section.

Jennifer Farwell
Yahoo! Small Business
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