Managing  categories is a very important step for all for shopping cart owners.  We at Apsona have incorporated a lot of user feedback  from several Zen Cart and osCommerce shopping cart owners and have enhanced Category imports.

ShopAdmin is flexbile. You can choose to import categories independently and then import products to those categories or you can choose to import new products and create new categories to those products on the fly. You can also have a single product in multiple categories.

Categories in ShopAdmin can be found under the Products table tab. Click  and the categories page opens up with two panels.  On the left side panel you will will see the category name and its parent( if there is a parent). Click on a category name and the details to the category show up on the right side panel. You can also add a category manually on this page as well.

You can import products into multiple categories with the import wizard.  The import process is  the three steps – pasting data, matching or lining up fields and validating data before clicking the import button. Whether you are importing just categories or products and categories the import process is the same. Infact, the import process is the same across all tables in ShopAdmin.

Product categories are also multi-select. Some users preferred a visual tool to edit and link their products into multiple categories. ShopAdmin accommodates that. Click on a product and select the category field. All the category names drop down. Check the boxes before each category name and save. The saved product is now linked to multiple categories at once.

So whether it is importing a whole list of new categories or manually linking a product to multiple categories, you can do it with Apsona ShopAdmin and see the changes instantly in your Zen Cart or osCommerce shopping cart.

Sign up for a free account at http://aspsona.com.

A crucial property of product categories is that they are laid out in a hierarchy, with top-level categories, sub-categories and sub-sub-categories being possible. This hierarchy lets you classify the products you sell in your web store, so that your users can browse by category. For the cart administrator, both Zen Cart and osCommerce provide admin pages via which you can add, edit and remove categories. However, both systems require a hierarchical navigation through the category structure. Sometimes this makes it difficult to quickly find and update the category you are looking for.

With the new release of ShopAdmin (June 7, 2010), Zen Cart and osCommerce users can now manage category records with the same ShopAdmin interface they use for managing products, manufacturers, customers and orders. This includes finding, filtering, adding and editing categories, searching and filtering. It also includes import (i.e., upload) or update of entire batches of category records into the Zen Cart or osCommerce database. Category information is available via a new menu item under the Product tab.

Apsona addresses this very important feature with ease. The syntax while preparing the CSV for import is: parent category followed by a colon, a space and the sub category. Example, Accessories: Caps. This way there will be no confusion when importing or updating multiple products with the same name but belonging to different categories. Just like all other tables in ShopAdmin, categories and sub categories when imported or updated can also be instantly visible in the Zen Cart and osCommerce databases.

The Apsona team aims to minimise the learning curve and make the user experience seamless and friendly. The beauty of Apsona ShopAdmin is an existing user does not need to do anything when  new features are added. These features will take effect automatically the next time the user reloads Apsona ShopAdmin.

Do try out Apsona ShopAdmin. Data management has never been so easy. Sign up for a free account at apsona.com.

Apsona ShopAdmin for Zen Cart & osCommerce is now two months old, and at Apsona, we could not be happier with the response so far. Zen Cart and osCommerce shop owners have found our product extremely useful for their day to day data management. The testimonials we have been receiving are very positive, and our commitment to Apsona ShopAdmin is stronger than ever. The testimonials and feedback reiterate the fact that an all-in-one mod for import, export, update and reporting of data is just what shop owners need.

As one would expect, we have had our share of teething troubles. We discovered that some hosting services require extra code to handle large data sets, while others have older PHP configurations that needed workarounds in the ShopAdmin code. This has sometimes caused slight problems when Apsona ShopAdmin is first installed. But our tech team has been able to successfully resolve all issues so far. In some cases, we had to use a screen-sharing session over the internet, while others were a simple matter of fixing configurations. In most cases, however, our users have been up and running within minutes of signing up.

We have been regularly enhancing the software with new features. With each enhancement, we send email to our users informing them of the update. Our technology and architecture is such that, invariably, the users need to do nothing more than refreshing their ShopAdmin window for the update to take effect.

Overall, we are very pleased with how things have gone so far, and we have a continuing commitment to maintain and enhance ShopAdmin. We look forward to working with you for many years to come.

Business intelligence or reporting is needed for all businesses – small, medium and large. Traditionally, large businesses have an IT department who run specialized database queries to produce reports. Now trends have changed and business whether small, medium or large want  answers to their questions from a wide variety of sources instantly.

Zen Cart and osCommerce users can now run sophisticated reports with Apsona ShopAdmin. Reports which can enable them to focus on targeting their customers with sharp, focused marketing messages. Some reports they can run are:

• Where do customers live by zip/area codes, city, state and country
• When did they last buy
• Who are the power buyers (repeat customers who also refer other new customers)
• Identify the top fifty customers
• What have customers last bought
• Identify the top 5 best selling products
• Weekly, monthly and quarterly sales
• Classify customer interests based on the purchases they made
• What times of the year do they buy
• Orders by region

With ShopAdmin, you can create reports such as those above with no effort. Get creative and run reports with the simple drag-and-drop interface provided in ShopAdmin. Include any fields you want, from any of your data records. Visualize data in graphs, matrices and charts and even publish reports on the web. Set up and customize the dashboard with any of the created reports from all tables.

ShopAdmin reports do much more than just pretty graphics, however. Quite frequently, you would want to extract a specific piece of the data in your shopping cart for operational use. For example, you might want to list the names, email addresses and products bought by all those customers who visited your store during last year’s Christmas season, so that you can send them a custom promotional email. With ShopAdmin, you can create exactly this report, run it a few times to make sure it has what you need, and then export its results in CSV format for use with your favorite mailing program.

With a  free Apsona ShopAdmin account,  Zen Cart and osCommerce users now have the power to analyze their eCommerce data in some very interesting and exciting ways.

Sign up for a free ShopAdmin account and see for yourself.

Apsona ShopAdmin has a powerful search feature. The application makes heavy use of JavaScript and dynamic HTML in the browser, leveraging the latest AJAX technologies to full effect. Whether it is a simple search or a multiple criteria search, results are obtained instantly. A simple search can be for example, a search for all your Customers with the last name beginning with S. To get this data set all you have to do is click on the arrow next to Search box.

A few fields from the table drop down. Check the field Last name and enter S in the search box. Click the lens icon or hit enter. Instantly you will see all your customers with the last name beginning with S.

Quickly find data records of your orders, customers,  products, product attributes or  manufacturers by multiple criteria. For example you can get data of all the order totals (Order table), of all orders which have been delivered (status – Order table) for customers whose last name (customer table) begins with S living in the state (customer table)of California. To get this data set click the arrow next to Search and select  More options. A filter editor opens up from where you can add terms for the search. Select Last name and State from the customer table as fields from the Customer table and Status and order total as fields from the Order table. Choose the relevant filter criteria for each term and click  Search. Results show up instantly. This data can be saved as a filter(with an appropriate name) and can be invoked any time in the future when required.

Try out Apsona Shop Admin’s Search & filtering. As one of our users said – Incredible and easy. Get your free account from apsona.com.

As a shopping cart administrator, you will want the convenience of being able to export a select set of your product records in a CSV format, edit them using your favorite spreadsheet program, and import them back into your cart database to update the fields you changed. A typical scenario where you might do this is when you want to change the prices or meta tags of a select group of records.

When you update a set of product records, you must tell your shopping cart database how to uniquely identify each of those records. Typically, you do this by providing the product’s model number along with each record. The operating assumption, then, is that every product record in your system has its own unique model number. And you, as cart administrator, are responsible for ensuring this uniqueness.

Note also that the Zen Cart and osCommerce databases maintain, within each product record, an internal Product ID field that uniquely identifies the record. You can export this data value and use it as the unique identifier, if you like. The problem is that the Product ID is a system-generated number, and has little significance to a human, because we humans are not very good at remembering the correspondences between numbers and products.

ShopAdmin now includes a feature that lets you use either model number or product id, depending on your preference. When you wish to update your product records via import, you can now choose the lookup field based on which ShopAdmin should do the update (see the screen shot below).

This way, you can use either field for specifying your product records. The only additional requirement, of course, is that the lookup field you choose must be available in your CSV data.

Coupled with ShopAdmin’s new multi-lingual capability, you can now maintain your product catalog much easier than before.

We hope you find this feature useful. Please feel free to contact us with your feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and, of course, what you liked about ShopAdmin.