Managing product categories for Office Brands members

Owned by John Nairn
Last updated: Aug 31, 2017 by Sharon Harden (Unlicensed)
2 min read

Categories and initial product data import

When Readysell imports the products from your old system we:

  • Put all your products in a sub-category under a under a category we create for your products where the top level category 'store products'
  • Your first price book run will move any products that are ezycodes to a sub-category under a the office brands category starting at the top level category 'web products'

Renaming of Office Brands Categories

If Office Brands renames an existing category, the web category id on the category will remain the same. As a result Readysell will automatically move all products from the old category to the new category. This includes all Office Brands products with ezycodes and all other products that do not have ezycodes.

Renaming categories is the easiest way to have the categories changed. You don't have to do anything if Office Brands take this approach.

New Office Brands Categories

If Office Brands categories change and your store products do not move to the new category:

  • Office Brands must have created a new category rather than renaming the old one. You can check by dragging "web category id" onto your category list view. You will see that the "web category id" on the old and new categories are different
    • Office Brands do not recommend using standard Office Brands categories for store products due to the fact that when Office Brands go to change the categories over to a new one and try to delete the old ones for the stores, they cannot as the old categories have store products on them which then causes issues for yourself because the products then are on a category that has no web category ID number to match it therefore making it not display on the website correctly.

If Office Brands create new categories instead of renaming existing ones, you will have to manage moving store products (products that do not have a productid that is an ezycode) either manually or with a mass update.

If Office Brands makes a new category and moves some products with ezycodes into that category. Office Brands specifies the new category in the OneX database. If you are using automatic product updates from Office Brands or if you run a price book run, Readysell:

Match the products with ezycodes as the productid on your product file against the new Office Brands data and change those products to the new category.

Each category has a web category id. We use this to match categories from Office Brands to your Readysell data. Since the category is new, it has a new web category id, Readysell has no way of matching the new category id with any existing categories.  As a result Readysell will not move any store products from the old to the new Office Brands category. 

Using Bulk Update Runs to move products between categories

The Readysell mass update feature allows you to move all products from an old category to a new category. This is the easiest way to manage changes to Office Brands categories where Office Brands have created a new category.

Processing Bulk Update Run for Product Categories.