Importing Your Catalog

Setting up your catalog on Handshake is usually a simple case of grabbing your current order form and juggling the data around in Excel a little bit. You will need:

• The items spreadsheet which lists out all the different products you're selling.
• (optional) A ZIP file of the images that go with some or all of your products.
• (optional) A variants spreadsheets that describes variations on your products, e.g. size and color.

Some friendly advice: avoid spreadsheet-formatting errors

When working with the various spreadsheets Handshake can import, please be aware that the column headers must be exactly as specified here (including capitalization), otherwise you will get errors complaining that your spreadsheets aren't formatted correctly.

The easiest way to avoid this is to use the Export buttons on the right-hand side of the bulk import page to get a basic copy of the spreadsheet to work on. By using system-generated spreadsheets as a starting point you can be sure your columns will be named correctly and avoid potentially frustrating errors.

XLSX will be more hassle-free than XLS

We support imports of both XLS (Excel 97-2004) and XLSX (Excel 2007 and onwards) files, however, due to the differences in the internal libraries used to handle the different filetypes, the XLSX handling is just, well ... smarter :)

In particular, our handling of XLSX files will correctly interpret non-decimal numbers more often, nicely handling cases where (for example) a barcode in your spreadsheet as 123456789012 will be interpreted as such, as opposed to something like 123456789012.0 or 1.23456789+e12.

The same is not always true for XLS and you may have to do more manual formatting to avoid problems like this.