With more than $5 trillion in annual sales worldwide, e-commerce is a major global industry, and platforms like Shopify, Etsy, and Wix have made it easier than ever to launch your own online storefront.
Although you may not have a brick-and-mortar location, an e-commerce store is still a retail business, and running one of your own requires a robust set of tools to manage your products and sales. Spreadsheet.com is well-suited for the job, offering advanced features like OpenAI integration built on top of the same familiar spreadsheet that’s ubiquitous in the world of business management.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at four Spreadsheet.com features – Data Types, OpenAI integration, Import from CSV, and Related Rows – that can help you set up and manage an e-commerce business with just a few worksheets.
With Spreadsheet.com’s 25+ rich Data Types, it’s easy to keep all of our product information in one place. Data Types like dropdown Select options, photo and file attachments, rich text, and more help Spreadsheet.com workbooks contain more kinds of data than the average spreadsheet.
Try using other powerful Data Types like Checkbox, Multiselect, Column Formula, and more in your workbooks.
SEO, or search engine optimization, looms large in the world of e-commerce. When you optimize your store’s SEO, search engines like Google and Bing will rank you higher in search results. Higher rankings tend to lead to more visitors, which in turn leads to more sales.
Mastering SEO optimization usually takes a decent amount of expertise and a lot of research. But with a Spreadsheet.com workbook, you can ask OpenAI to take care of it for you.
In the example above, we’re giving OpenAI a product name (Column A) and list of keywords (Column D), and using the OPENAI_COMPLETE function to ask it to return an SEO-optimized meta description (Column E) and product description (Column F).
By using a CONCATENATE function nested within an OPENAI_COMPLETE function, you can create this type of complex query with multiple cell references and text strings of instructions
If you’d prefer to write your product descriptions yourself, you can also give OpenAI a full product description and ask it to edit the text so that it has a better SEO value.
Tweak your OpenAI query by using more specific language until you get a description that you’re happy with. Try including language like…
…and compare the different outputs.
Compared to traditional brick-and-mortar retail, selling on an e-commerce platform makes it easy to expand your business internationally. To best reach customers in other countries, you need to localize – or adapt – your store for foreign markets.
Some e-commerce platforms handle this work for you, but in case they don’t, OpenAI can get the job done with a few simple prompts. With Spreadsheet.com’s OpenAI integration, you can ask OpenAI to translate product titles and descriptions into any other language.
In the example above, we’re giving OpenAI the text that it previously generated and prompting it to translate that into another language. Here we’ve translated our English text into Spanish (Column G) and French (Column H). OpenAI can also translate text into languages with non-Latin alphabets like Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese.
Once you have your e-commerce business up and running, you’ll need to manage your sales data. Most e-commerce platforms provide some built-in tools to view and analyze your sales data, but they aren’t as versatile or feature-rich as a full spreadsheet.
With Spreadsheet.com’s Import from CSV feature, you can configure a sales worksheet to your liking and then import a CSV-download from your e-commerce platform so that it matches your Spreadsheet.com setup.
When you use Import from CSV, you can map each CSV column to an existing column in a Spreadsheet.com workbook. Instead of limiting your workflow by adapting it to the way that your e-commerce platform presents you with data, you can make the data adapt to your workflow.
From the import dialog, choose the Spreadsheet.com column that each CSV column should be imported into and specify how matching rows should be treated. Then click Import, and your sales data is ready to be analyzed in Spreadsheet.com.
Try adding a chart, calculating aggregate information with a Column Formula, or applying filtering, sorting, and grouping to break down your information.
Now that you have one worksheet with product information and another with sales data, you can link the two like tables in a relational database by using Related Rows. Related Rows can connect records across different worksheets, allowing you to denote important connections and access row information in different locations.
In the example above, we’ve linked each record in our Sales Data worksheet with the corresponding product in our Product Information worksheet. When we click on a Related Row value in the Sales Data worksheet, we can see an expanded row view of that product’s information in our other worksheet.
Now, we can access all of our product information – like keywords, attachments, and descriptions – without leaving the Sales Data worksheet. We can even edit rows in the Product Information sheet from this expanded view.
Using Related Rows can transform simple worksheets into a powerful database for your e-commerce business with just a few clicks. Try using Related Row Lookups and Related Row Rollups to do more with your Related Rows.
Ready to use Spreadsheet.com to help run your e-commerce business? Get started for free today. Check out our Template Gallery to get a head start on your workbooks, or begin creating your own from scratch.
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