1. Getting started

Signing in

1. Go to the portal.
2. Type your email address and your password.
3. Click Sign in.

You stay signed in for 30 days, so you will not have to do this often. There is no "sign up" button on purpose — if you need an account, or you have forgotten your password, ask Allan to set it up for you.

The two tabs

At the top you will see two buttons. They swap between the two halves of the portal.

• Products — the big list of everything we sell. This is where you type.
• Price tracker — what other shops are charging. This is where you look.

2. The Products page

It looks like a big spreadsheet, because that is what it is. One line = one product. Each column holds one piece of information, like the brand or the price.

There are about 5,000 products, so the portal only shows 100 at a time. Use the ‹ Prev and Next › buttons underneath the toolbar to move through them, or change Rows per page if you want more on screen at once.

Finding a product

You have three ways, and you can use them together:

• Search the sheet — type anything: part of the name, the code, the brand. It looks in every column, so you do not have to know which one.
• The brand box — pick a brand and you only see that brand.
• Price tracker only — flick this on and you only see products we are watching other shops on.

Clear the search box and set the brand back to All brands to see everything again.

Changing something

1. Click on the box you want to change.
2. Type.
3. Press Enter. That saves it.

Two extras worth knowing:

• Press Esc instead and it forgets what you typed and puts the old text back.
• Hold Shift and press Enter to start a new line inside the same box. Handy for a long description.

Look at the small grey writing at the top right. It says Saving… for a second, then All changes saved. That is how you know it worked. There is no save button — every box saves on its own.

In the Attribute Type and Attribute Value boxes a little list pops up with the usual answers. Click one, or ignore it and type your own — both are fine.

Adding one new product

1. Click + Add SKU at the top right.
2. A blank line appears at the top and your cursor lands in the SKU box.
3. Fill it in, pressing Enter after each box.

If you had picked a brand in the brand box first, the new line already has that brand filled in.

Sending products to VerticalPlus

VerticalPlus run our actual website. They need a file, not a login. So:

1. If you only want one brand, pick it in the brand box first.
2. Click Export CSV.
3. A file lands in your Downloads folder. Email that to VerticalPlus.

The file comes out in exactly the layout they asked for, with their column names, so do not rename anything in it. The MAP and EW URL columns are left out of that file on purpose — those two are ours, for price watching, and VerticalPlus do not want them.

3. Importing a sheet

This is the quick way to add a lot of products at once. Somebody fills in a spreadsheet, you drop it in, and the portal creates all the lines for you.

Step by step

1. Get the file onto your computer. From Google Sheets that is File → Download → Microsoft Excel (.xlsx). A .csv file works too.
2. On the Products page, click Import sheet. A panel slides in from the right.
3. Click Choose a file, or drag the file onto the dotted box.
4. Read what it tells you. Nothing has been saved yet. See below.
5. Choose what to do with the lines (the drop-down at the bottom).
6. Click Import. It counts up as it goes, then tells you what it did.

What it tells you before you commit

• How many lines it found, and how many columns it recognised.
• Green tags — one per column it understood. If your heading has a different name to ours, the tag shows where it is going, like Colour → Attribute Value. Have a quick look down them; that arrow is the bit worth checking.
• Ignored — columns it did not recognise. Those are left out completely. If something important is on that list, change the heading in your spreadsheet to match ours and drop the file in again.
• A preview of the first few lines, so you can see it has lined up properly.

The headings are what matter

The portal matches your columns by their heading, not by where they sit. So the order does not matter, and you only need the columns you actually filled in — you can leave the rest out.

It also knows the common ways people write the same thing. EAN, EAN Number and Barcode all end up in the barcode column. MPN, Part No and OEM/MFR Part No all end up in the manufacturer part code column.

If you want to be certain, click Download the blank template in that same panel. That gives you a spreadsheet with our exact headings. Fill it in, drop it back in, and everything lines up.

The two choices at the bottom

• Add every row as a new product — use this for new stock. Every line in the file becomes a brand new line in the portal.
• Update where the SKU matches, add the rest — use this when you are correcting products we already have. If a line's SKU is already in the portal it changes that one instead of making a duplicate. If the SKU is new, it gets added.

Three things that will save you a headache

• An empty box never wipes anything. If you leave a cell blank in your spreadsheet, whatever is already in the portal stays as it is. So a sheet with only two columns filled in can only ever add to what we have.
• Do not press Import twice. On the "add" setting it will put everything in a second time. If you do it by accident, tell Allan rather than deleting 200 lines by hand.
• Skipped lines are normal. Some products have the same SKU on several lines (one per colour or size). When you are updating, the portal will not guess which one you meant, so it skips it and lists the SKU for you. Fix those few by hand in the sheet.

4. The three little buttons on each row

On the far left of every line there are three small buttons.

× — delete

Removes that line. It asks you first, and it cannot be undone, so read the SKU in the question before you click Yes.

🔗 — shop links

This is where you tell the portal which other shops to watch for that product. The number on the button is how many links it has.

1. Click 🔗 to open the panel.
2. Paste the other shop's page for that exact product into the box at the bottom and click Add.
3. The portal tidies the link up and works out the shop's name by itself. You can edit either if it gets it wrong.

Each link has a few settings:

• active means we check it every night. paused means we leave it alone. mismatch means the page turned out to be a different product.
• competitor is a rival shop. manufacturer (RRP) is the brand's own shop — we use that as the list price, not as a rival.
• Match value is the part code or barcode on that page. Filling it in makes the price checking much more accurate, because shop titles are often odd.

Five rival shops per product is the sensible maximum. Over that it warns you, but it will not stop you.

✨ — let the computer fill it in

Click this and the portal goes off and reads the maker's website for that product, then suggests the boring columns for you: description, features, sub-category, weight, datasheet and picture. It takes about fifteen seconds.

You then get a card for each suggestion, and you decide:

• Accept puts it into the sheet, exactly as if you had typed it.
• Reject throws it away.

Nothing is saved until you press Accept. Do check it — click source ↗ to see the page it read. It is usually right, but it can grab the wrong version of a product, like a twin pack when you wanted a single. That is exactly why a person has to say yes.

5. The Price tracker

Every night the portal visits the shop pages you added with the 🔗 button, reads their prices, and saves them. This tab shows you the result. You do not have to start it — it happens on its own overnight.

Picking a day

The drop-down at the top lists each night's check, newest first. Pick one to see the prices as they were that day.

The four boxes

• MAP breaches — a shop is selling below the lowest price the brand allows. This is the one that matters. It is worth telling the brand about.
• Undercut by competitor — somebody is cheaper than us.
• EW is cheapest — we are the cheapest. Good.
• Failed scrapes — pages we could not read last night. Usually the shop blocked us or moved the page.

Narrowing it down

The grey bar under the boxes filters the table: by shop, category or brand. Two are worth explaining:

• Variance basis — what to compare against. vs Eco Wizard = against our price. vs MAP = against the lowest allowed price.
• Min |variance| % — hide the small stuff. Put 10 in and you only see prices that are more than 10% out, either way.

The four boxes at the top recount themselves as you filter. Reset puts it all back.

Reading the table

• MAP £ — the lowest price the brand lets anyone advertise.
• RRP £ — the brand's own price on their own website.
• EW £ — our price.
• Retailer £ — what that shop is charging.
• Var vs … — the difference, in pounds and as a percentage. Green means dearer than the thing it is compared to, red means cheaper.
• BELOW MAP in red — that shop has broken the brand's minimum price.
• Position — EW Cheaper or EW Dearer, at a glance.

Click any heading to sort by it. Click the shop's name to open their page in a new tab.

Getting it out as a file

Download filtered CSV saves what is on screen right now, filters and all. Open it in Excel to send it on to somebody.

6. What the words mean

SKU

Our own code for one product. It is how we tell one thing from another. The same SKU can be on more than one line when a product comes in different colours or sizes — that is normal, not a mistake.

Manufacturer part code (MPN)

The maker's own code for it. Very useful, because every shop uses the same one, so it is the best way to prove two pages are the same product.

Barcode (EAN)

The 13-digit number under the barcode on the box. Same idea as the part code.

RRP

Recommended retail price — what the brand says it should sell for.

MAP

Minimum advertised price — the lowest price a brand will let any shop advertise. Shops are not supposed to go under it. When one does, that is a "breach".

ex VAT

The price before the 20% tax is added. "inc VAT" is with it. Trade shops usually write prices ex VAT, normal shops write them inc VAT — so always check which one a page is showing before comparing.

Attribute type and value

How one product differs from its brother. The type is what varies (Colour), the value is which one (Black).

VerticalPlus

The company that runs ecowizard.co.uk. We send them a file, they load it onto the website.

Scrape

The portal reading a shop's page to find the price. A "run" is one night's worth of them.

7. If something goes wrong

Red writing: "Save failed — change reverted"

It could not save, so it put the old text back rather than pretend. Check your internet, then type it again. Nothing is half saved.

It has thrown me back to the sign-in box

Your 30 days ran out. Sign in again and carry on.

The import says "No recognised column headings"

The headings have to be on the first row of the sheet, and they have to be words the portal knows. Download the blank template and copy your data into that.

The import only recognised two or three columns

The other headings are spelled differently to ours. Look at the Ignored list, rename those headings in your spreadsheet, and drop the file in again.

✨ came back with nothing

It could not read the pages it found. Fill that one in by hand. Some brands are trade-only and have nothing public to read.

A product keeps showing up under "Failed scrapes"

Click 🔗 on that product and open the link. If the page has moved or the product is gone, paste in the new link or set the old one to paused.

Anything else

Tell Allan what you were doing and what it said. A screenshot of the message is worth ten minutes of explaining.