Sales Channels

The simple objective of any sales channel, either B2B2C or B2C, is to generate revenue for them and for you.

B2B Storefronts generate revenue from credit card transaction fees (partnership with payment providers) and monthly recurring revenue charged to the merchants.
B2C Marketplaces generate revenue from selling your products to their customers. It is their main objective to attract new buyers and make sure the transaction happens in their portal or application. Credit card fees and platform fee is deducted from the paid amount.

In both cases, the ecosystem needs to be able to:

Know how many units can be sold (your inventory)
Price and promote your product
Be ready for shipping (know the product's location, weight and dimensions)

Without these data points about your product, no storefront or marketplace can generate transactions, since they need to pass information to the logistics companies which fulfil the order. Marketplaces only pay their merchants upon order fulfilment.

Data Preparation

Trustana facilitates exporting product information on several channel-specific templates.

These features can greatly benefit distributors and retailers handling multiple online sales channels, as Trustana not only maps attributes correctly but also transforms certain data points and includes variant-specific information as output on the channel template. Manually preparing data to match a channel template can easily take hours for 100 SKUs, and even more if there are plenty of Variant Groups with different variation attributes.

To make the best out of these features, it is critical to understand what is mandatory for each sales channel and make sure your product information is complete to guarantee a successful import, or else it may fail the channel validation when importing.

Once this is sorted out, the focus shifts towards adding as much information about your product as possible, as this will have a direct impact on your potential buyer's experience discovering your product, and hence platform transactions.

Overview of Mandatory Headers

To ensure a successful first-time import or subsequent update imports, the minimum requirement goes down to not having empty cells for mandatory columns.

Field	Description	Trustana Attribute	Mandatory for
Product Name	The product name should include the product brand and model.	`Product Name` or `Smart Product Name` For variant products, `Variant Group Name`	Lazada Shopee Shopify Woo
Product Description	A good product description enhances the quality of your listing and increases the chances of sales.	`Product Description` or `Smart Product Description`	Shopee
Product Image	This is the main image of your product page. (not variant image)	`Cover Image`	Lazada Shopify Woo
Weight	This refers to the Gross Weight of the product, including packaging when ready to ship. Platforms use this to calculate shipping costs.	`Item Gross Weight` Usually in kg or g.	Lazada Shopee Shopify Woo
Price	Mandatory as sales channels are transactional. Items without price cannot be published.	`Price`	Lazada Shopee Shopify Woo
Inventory	Mandatory as sales channels are transactional. Items with 0 inventory cannot be published.	`Stock` When unavailable, it is defaulted to "1".	Lazada Shopee Shopify Woo
Dimensions	This refers to the Package Length, Width and Height when ready to ship. Platforms use this to calculate shipping costs.	`Package Length` `Package Width` `Package Height` Usually in cm.	Lazada
Channel Category	This greatly impacts product discovery. B2C Channels have their proprietary categorisation systems. E-commerce providers use either an adaptation of Google Taxonomy or allow the configuration of a user-defined category tree.	`Lazada Category ID`	Lazada
Brand	The brand of your product.	`Lazada Brand ID`	Lazada
Handle	Shopify's unique identifier for a product, created from the product name. It is the product name on URL, greatly affects SEO.	Generated from `Product Name` For variant products, `Variant Group Name`	Shopify

Notes:

Other than "Handle", all channels accept these fields in their templates, however, the purpose of the table is to show which ones are mandatory.
There are other optional fields not included in this table:
- B2B E-commerce: SKU, Barcode, Promotional Price, Tags, Google Category, Vendor, Taxable, Image Alt Text (SEO), SEO Title, SEO Description, Google Shopping meta fields, Cost per item, Status, amongst others
- B2C Marketplace: SKU, Barcode, Dangerous goods, Product Name in Chinese, among others.

Exporting Variants

Variable (parent) and variant (child) products have additional logic when exported:

The Parent's Product Name replaces child's Product Name, as all variant products must have the same name. Make sure they are also optimised for the channel with keywords using AI Enrichment Service.
In some cases, product images must be uploaded as part of the Variable Product data (parent), not at the Variant Product (child) level.
Some exports will require a Product Type column indicating for each row if the row represents a simple, variable, or variant product.
In all cases, Channel templates require specifying the name of the variation attribute in one column, followed by the value for that product. The names and values exported are derived from the Variation Tiers selection at the parent level and follow the user's selection order.

Field	Description	Trustana Attribute	Mandatory for
Variation Image	An image for the variant product. Usually use to show what changes from variation to variation. May be used a thumbnail in channel's variant selection component.	`Cover Image`	Shopee
Variation 1 Name	The name of the attribute selected as Tier 1. Example: "Color"	Variant Group Tier 1 Selected Attribute `Attrbitue Name` under the parent's `VariantAttributes` configuration.	For Variants Products only Lazada Shopee Shopify Woo
Variation 1 Value	The corresponding value of the attribute selected as Tier 1, saved on the product record. Example: "Blue"	`Value` saved on Product for Variant Group Tier 1 Selected Attribute	Lazada Shopee Shopify Woo
Variation 2 Name	The name of the attribute selected as Tier 2. Example: "Size"	Variant Group Tier 2 Selected Attribute `Attrbitue Name` under the parent's `VariantAttributes` configuration.
Variation 2 Value	The corresponding value of the attribute selected as Tier 2, saved on the product record. Example: "Large"	`Value` saved on Product for Variant Group Tier 2 Selected Attribute	If "Variation 2 Name" has a value, then the corresponding value column is mandatory.
Variation 3 Name	The name of the attribute selected as Tier 3. Example: "Organic" (Only Shopify and WooCommerce support 3 levels)	Variant Group Tier 3 Selected Attribute `Attrbitue Name` under the parent's `VariantAttributes` configuration.
Variation 3 Value	The corresponding value of the attribute selected as Tier 3, saved on the product record. Example: "Yes" (Only Shopify and WooCommerce support 3 levels)	`Value` saved on Product for Variant Group Tier 3 Selected Attribute	If "Variation 3 Name" has a value, then the corresponding value column is mandatory.

Channel Summary

Name	Type	Template Image Requirements	Image Specifications	Category System	Variants per Product
Shopify	B2B E-Commerce	Images per Product: 50 (different rows) Images per Variant: 1	JPEG, PNG, PSD, TIFF, BMP, GIF, SVG, HEIC, or WebP Less than 20 MB Resolution Maximum 5000x5000px Best results: Cover: 1920x1080px Products: 2048x2048px	Modified Google Taxonomy	100 maximum
WooCommerce	B2B E-Commerce	Images per Product: 8 (same cell) Images per Variant: 1	JPEG or PNG Less than 2 GB Best results: Larger than 1000x1000px	Empty, user-defined	Configurable
Shopee	B2C Marketplace	Images per Product: 1 cover + 9 Images per Variant: 1	JPG, JPEG, PNG. Size Less than 2.0 MB Resolution Minimum: 1 x 1 px	Shopee Category System	50 maximum
Lazada	B2C Marketplace	Images per Product: 8 Images per Variant: 1	JPEG, PNG Size Less than 3.0 MB Resolution Minimum 330x330 Maximum 5000x5000 px	Lazada Category System

Considerations using export to Batch Edit

The available channels are sales-oriented, either B2B or B2C. This means Price and Inventory are critical to revenue generation. It is known that these values may change regularly.

Factors affecting the variability of these attributes:

Promotional Pricing
Pricing across multiple markets (different currencies)
Product demand
Inventory operations

Channels will process the information exported from Trustana as final, and will override whatever information exists for a particular SKU. Hence, it is strongly suggested to make sure values in Trustana are correct at the moment of export.

Pricing

Trustana does not convert or default any value for Price. If this attribute value is empty, it will be exported empty and import is likely to fail.

Note: This is mappable in channel configuration to any attribute with type "price".

Stock Levels

Trustana exports Stock, however if the corresponding value is 0 or blank, Trustana will default the value to "1". This is to facilitate a first-time import of product information and images. Users can always manually change the inventory levels on the channel, or import their inventories using Smart Importer.

Note: This is mappable in channel configuration to any attribute with type "number".