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The Product Upload Story: Why I built this tool

Why I started working on Product Upload and what this problem means to me. Learn about my journey and the future of this product importer.

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How it all began

The Product Upload Story: How It All Began

As a software engineer, I love building products that solve problems which people around me have. I think there's too many tech companies out there doing things that are abstract or just to make a quick buck. Whilst it's important to feed your family, I think it's more important to build things that matter.

Why Product Upload Matters

The inspiration for Product Upload came from watching my Mum working on her online store. Every fortnight she spends hours copying products from her suppliers' websites into her Wix store. Manually finding them, screenshotting the images, copying the descriptions, prices, names, and important info and then pasting them into Wix.

This sparked an idea, but I didn't do anything about it for a few months. Then my wife started her own online store and I saw her doing the same thing. She was more high tech and used a spreadsheet in the process too but the process was still tedious and time-consuming.

After seeing 2 of 2 people I know running online stores doing the same thing I realised surely this is a problem that everyone working with suppliers in their online store face.

The Process of building Product Upload

I started by building a basic website, which used some pretty rudimentary scraping techniques to copy products from a few websites. I showed it to my Mum and she loved it. She was able to copy products in seconds instead of hours.

I then started building a more robust version of the tool, which could copy products from any website. I added a bunch of features like image selection, automatic SEO optimisation, and a bunch of more advanced features.

The future shape of Product Upload

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of what Product Upload is capable of. There's a real disconnect between stores and their suppliers which leads to a lot of manual work which distracts from the core business of running a store.

Not only do I see Product Upload becoming better and better at copying products, but I also hope to be able to more deeply integrate with suppliers and stores to make the whole process much more enjoyable for both parties.

How you can help?

If you're interested in helping me build the future of Product Upload, I'd love to hear from you. I'm always looking for feedback, ideas, and people who want to help build something great.

Drop me a line on [email protected].