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 three tabs

At the top you will see three buttons. They swap between the parts 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.
• Analytics — how the price checking itself is getting on, over whatever dates you choose.

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.

Seeing the columns off to the right

The sheet is far wider than any screen, so a lot of columns sit off to the right. There is a slider just above the sheet: grab it and pull it right, and the columns come across. You can also click anywhere along it to jump straight there. It is the same as the bar underneath the sheet — it is up top as well so you do not have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it. This works on both tabs.

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 drop-downs — brand, category, sub-category and attribute type. Each one shows how many products are in it, e.g. "Inverters (190)", and you can combine them: pick a brand and a category to see just that corner of the sheet. A drop-down only appears once there is something in that column to pick.
• Price tracker only — flick this on and you only see products we are watching other shops on.
• Active products / Archived / Active + archived — which pile to look in. It starts on Active products, so archived ones stay out of your way until you ask for them. See archiving below.

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

Archiving — finished with it, but keeping it

When you have finished with a product, archive it instead of deleting it. The line stays exactly as it is, with everything you typed. It just stops showing up.

1. Press 📦 on the line, or tick several lines and press Archive N ticked at the top.
2. They disappear from the sheet. Nothing has been thrown away.
3. To see them again, change the drop-down at the top to Archived.
4. To bring one back, press ↩ on it — or tick some and press Restore N ticked.

Archived products still download. Switch to Archived, tick what you want and press Export exactly as normal. You can still search them, still read them and still change them — they are simply not in the way while you work.

Archiving does not take a product off the Price tracker — it carries on being checked every night. If you want the price checks to stop too, switch its Track box off as well.

This is the safe version of ×. Deleting a product also destroys its shop links and its whole price history, and cannot be undone. Archiving keeps the lot.

Supplier and Brand are two different columns

Brand is the name on the box — Bluetti, EcoFlow, Zaptec. Supplier is who we buy it from, which is often somebody else entirely. Fill in either, both, or neither.

Both go in the file you send VerticalPlus. Their own Supplier/Brand column takes the Brand, and Supplier is added on the end as a column of its own. There is a Supplier drop-down at the top like the brand one, so you can pull up everything from one supplier at a time.

RRP and ex-VAT fill each other in

They are the same price with and without VAT, so you only have to type one. Type an RRP of 999.00 and the ex vat Price becomes 832.50 on its own. Type an ex-VAT price and the RRP appears the same way.

• If the other box is empty, it just fills in.
• If the other box already holds a different price somebody chose, it asks first and shows you both numbers. Say no and it leaves your price alone.
• If the box holds something that is not a number, like POA, nothing is worked out — you are in charge of that one.

Changing something

1. Click on the box you want to change.
2. Type.
3. Press Enter. That saves it and moves you to the box underneath, like Excel.

Moving around works like Excel too:

• The arrow keys move you to the next box up, down, left or right, saving as you go. (Left and right only leave a box once the cursor reaches its start or end, so you can still fix a typo in the middle of a word.)
• Tab moves right, Shift + Tab moves left, and both carry on to the next row at the end of a line.
• 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.

Copying a value down a column

Click in a box and a small green square appears on its bottom-right corner. Drag that square down (or up) over the boxes you want, and let go — they all get the same value.

• If any of those boxes already had something different in them, it asks first, because there is no undo.
• Dragging an RRP or ex vat Price fills in the partner price too, where that box was empty or already matched. Where it held its own separate price, that price is left alone and the message at the top tells you how many.
• It only reaches the rows on the page you are looking at.

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 Tab after each box to move along the row.

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. Tick the lines you want to send — the tick boxes are the first column, on the far left — and the file contains exactly those and nothing else.

1. Tick the lines you want. The button changes to say how many, e.g. Export 20 ticked.
2. Click it. A file lands in your Downloads folder.
3. Email that to VerticalPlus.

Three things that make ticking twenty lines quick:

• The box in the very top corner ticks everything on the page at once.
• Tick one, then hold Shift and tick another — everything between the two gets ticked. Same as a spreadsheet.
• Ticks stay put while you search or turn the page, so you can gather lines from all over. The green N ticked label always tells you how many you are holding, and Clear lets them all go.

Doing a batch of new products

This is the usual job: twenty new products, get the details, check them, send them.

1. Add the lines, or import a sheet of them.
2. Press ✨ on each to fill in the details.
3. Check them. Press ✓ on each row, or Accept all to sign off everything on screen at once.
4. Tick the twenty lines and press Export 20 ticked.
5. Email the file.

If you tick nothing and press the button, it sends everything you are looking at instead, and asks you first. That is handy for a whole brand — pick the brand, send the lot — but if you only meant twenty lines, tick them.

Nothing is deleted by sending. The lines stay in the sheet exactly as they were.

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 little buttons on each row

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

📦 — archive (and ↩ — put it back)

Takes the line out of the way without losing any of it. This is the one to use when you have finished with a product. Full details in archiving above.

× — delete

Removes that line. It asks you first, and it cannot be undone, so read the SKU in the question before you click Yes. It also takes that product's shop links and its price history with it — if you just want it out of the way, press 📦 instead.

The Track column — putting a product on the price tracker

Near the left of the sheet is a Track column. Click it to move a product on or off the price tracker. That is the switch — nothing else decides it.

The usual order of doing it:

1. Press 🔗 and add a shop link (a rival, or the maker's own page).
2. Paste our own page into the EW product URL column, so there is something to compare against.
3. Click Track. The product moves onto the tracker immediately.

• ✓ green — on the tracker, and it has everything it needs.
• ✓ amber — on the tracker, but something is missing: no shop links, or no Eco Wizard link to compare against. Hover to see which.
• ✗ grey — off the tracker. Click to put it on.

Taking a product off does not delete anything. The shop links stay exactly as they are, so you can put it back on later with one click. You never need to delete links just to stop watching something.

The moment you switch it on, the product appears on the Price tracker tab marked awaiting first check. The actual prices arrive after the next overnight check, so it will sit there with empty price boxes until the morning — that is normal, and it is showing you that it is on the list.

🔗 — 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 searches the web for that product and shows you what it found — you pick the page it should read. Choose the one that is this exact product (watch the size, the colour, whether it is a multi-pack); the ↗ beside a result opens it in a new tab so you can look before you choose. Pages that look like a shop's category list are marked and pushed to the bottom, but they are still there in case one of them is the right one.

Once you pick, it reads that page and fills in the boring columns for you: title, description, features, category, sub-category, weight, datasheet, picture, part code, barcode, attribute value and RRP. It takes about fifteen seconds. A little box tells you how it is getting on — you can close that box, it carries on in the background either way.

Why you pick and not the computer. It used to choose for itself and it kept choosing the wrong page — usually a shop's front page rather than the product. You can tell the right one from the wrong one in a couple of seconds; it cannot.

Category is only ever one of the categories you already use on the website — it picks the best fit from your own list, and if none of them fits it leaves the box empty rather than making one up.

RRP is the price the page it read was selling at, always including VAT. Trade sites often print their prices without VAT, so it adds the VAT on when the page says so. When a page is not clear about it, it leaves RRP empty on purpose — a blank is easy to spot, a price that is 20% out is not. Do check it against the maker's own site before you quote it: if the page it read was a shop rather than the manufacturer, that is the shop's price, not the official RRP.

Pictures. It puts a link to the product photo in the Image ref box. If it picked the wrong one, the little box lists every picture it found on that page — click "pictures found", then copy the one you want into the Image ref box. There is also a see the page ↗ link that opens the page it read, so you can look at the photos yourself.

You do not need much to start it. A brand and a code — the SKU or the part number — is enough; it will work out the title and the rest from there. Add a new row, type those two in, press ✨, and let it do the typing.

If none of the results is right, there are two ways on. Change the words it searches for — the box under the list starts with the brand and the part number, so try the full product name instead — or find the page yourself, paste the link into the bottom box and press Use this page. Either way it reads exactly the page you meant. After a run, Pick another page takes you back to the same list without searching again.

Two rules it always follows:

• It only fills in empty boxes. Anything you or VerticalPlus already put in is never touched, even if the computer disagrees with it.
• It shows you what it wrote. Every box it filled goes a faint green with a green line down its left edge, and the toolbar tells you how many rows are waiting to be looked at.

When you have looked at a row, clear the green in one of three ways:

• Change something — typing in a green box and pressing Enter clears that box.
• Press ✓ on the row — that means "I have read this, it is fine" and clears the whole row. It does not change any of your words.
• Accept all in the toolbar — the same thing for every row on screen at once. It only ever covers what you are looking at, so narrow the screen down first if you do not mean the lot.

Please do actually look. Hover over a green box and it tells you which page it read. It is usually right, but it can grab the wrong version of a product — a twin pack when you wanted a single — and it cannot tell that it has. Nothing else can catch that, only you reading the row. If you export the CSV while rows are still green, it will ask you first.

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. The Analytics tab

The Price tracker tab shows you one night. This tab shows you a stretch of days — how much price checking actually got done, how much of it worked, and where prices moved. Set From and To, or use the Last 7 days / Last 30 days / All time buttons.

The six numbers along the top

• Prices captured — readings we successfully turned into a price.
• Readings that worked — the success rate. Green is healthy; if it drops into amber or red, shops have started blocking us or moving pages.
• Products watched and Shops seen — how wide the net is.
• Readings below MAP — a shop advertising under the brand's floor price. This is the one worth acting on.
• Failed readings — pages we could not get a price from.

The charts

Prices captured each day is one bar per night: green is what we got, orange on top is what failed. A short bar means the run did not finish. Show as a table gives you the same thing as numbers if you would rather read it that way.

Why readings failed splits the failures. "Wrong product on the page" means a link needs fixing with the 🔗 button; "Shop blocked us" is usually temporary.

Biggest price moves

The first and last price we saw for each shop link, and the difference. This is where you spot a competitor quietly dropping their price.

Some trade shops write their prices without VAT, and now and then we read the same page two different ways on two different nights — which looks like a 20% jump that never happened. Those links are left out of this table, and the amber note under the failures chart tells you how many there are and which shop. So a number in this table is a real price change, not a VAT muddle.

8. 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.

✨ found nothing, or none of the results is the right product

First try different words in the search box under the list — the full product name instead of the part number often does it, because some part codes appear nowhere on the web. If that still fails, look it up yourself, paste the link into the bottom box and press "Use this page": it reads exactly that page and skips searching altogether, which nearly always sorts it.

✨ filled the row in from the wrong version of the product

A twin pack instead of a single, or the 150-litre instead of the 200. Press Pick another page and choose a better result, then correct the boxes it got wrong. It will not overwrite anything that already has something in it, so clear a box first if you want it researched again.

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.