No, this is not checking the prices of the products that you are actually selling against competition so that you can add enough markup to ensure a good margin, but the boring old job of data entry into the database on your website. I’m currently wading through hundreds of product options correcting someone else’s erroneous data entry. Unfortunately, they have been doing this gradually over a couple of weeks, while other work has been going on on the same website, so there is no way to automatically roll-back the database to before they started.

The cost to the business

This is costing me time, and time costs money, but it would be far worse to publish the website with incorrect prices on it and have someone actually order a product (or two) at a loss.

Data import

eCommerce stores often have clever ways to import product information, however they should be used with caution. I’ll never forget the time I accidentally updated thousands of products by 15% because there was no check-back button to say ‘are you sure?’ This made me very unpopular with the person who had to fix it. Nothing beats a well organised product database with all the right product information, which can often be used over and over in other business areas, not only the website, provided it can be exported in a tidy format. A valuable asset.