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. |
| Lazada |
Product Description | A good product description enhances the quality of your listing and increases the chances of sales. |
| Shopee |
Product Image | This is the main image of your product page. (not variant image) |
| Lazada |
Weight | This refers to the Gross Weight of the product, including packaging when ready to ship.
Platforms use this to calculate shipping costs. |
Usually in kg or g. | Lazada |
Price | Mandatory as sales channels are transactional. Items without price cannot be published. |
| Lazada |
Inventory | Mandatory as sales channels are transactional. Items with 0 inventory cannot be published. |
When unavailable, it is defaulted to "1". | Lazada Woo |
Dimensions | This refers to the Package Length, Width and Height when ready to ship.
Platforms use this to calculate shipping costs. |
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 |
Brand | The brand of your product. |
| Lazada |
Handle | Shopify's unique identifier for a product, created from the product name. | Generated from
For variant products, |
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
Variant Group products have additional logic when exported:
Variant Group NamereplacesProduct Name, as all variant products must have the same name. Make sure they are also optimised.In some cases, product images have to be uploaded as part of the Variant Group details (parent), not at the Variant Product (child) level. The system will use the 'Main product' in the Variant Group.
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. |
| Shopee |
Variation 1 Name | The name of the attribute selected as Tier 1.
Example: "Color" | Variant Group Tier 1 Selected Attribute
| For Variants Products only
Lazada |
Variation 1 Value | The corresponding value of the attribute selected as Tier 1, saved on the product record.
Example: "Blue" |
| Lazada |
Variation 2 Name | The name of the attribute selected as Tier 2.
Example: "Size" | Variant Group Tier 2 Selected Attribute
|
|
Variation 2 Value | The corresponding value of the attribute selected as Tier 2, saved on the product record.
Example: "Large" |
| 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
|
|
Variation 3 Value | The corresponding value of the attribute selected as Tier 3, saved on the product record.
Example: "Yes" |
| 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 Group |
B2B E-Commerce | Images per Product: 50 (different rows) | JPEG, PNG, PSD, TIFF, BMP, GIF, SVG, HEIC, or WebP Less than 20 MB Resolution Maximum
Best results: Cover: 1920x1080px | Modified Google Taxonomy | 100 maximum | |
WooCommerce | B2B E-Commerce | Images per Product: 8 (same cell) | 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 | 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 | JPEG, PNG
Size Less than 3.0 MB
Resolution | 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.
Stock Levels
Trustana exports Sellable Inventory, 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 user Smart Importer.