Rebuilding forty old listings without losing your whole weekend
Retyping a catalogue is dull work, so batch it: files first, then titles and prices, then images, then the designer, in sittings you can actually finish.
Forty products. Forty titles, forty descriptions, forty prices, forty cover images, forty files to find on a hard drive that has been through two laptops. You do the arithmetic, decide it is a full weekend, and put it off until a weekend appears that never does. The arithmetic is roughly right, but the shape of the job is wrong. Done as one long slog it takes a weekend and you abandon it at product eleven. Done as four short passes it takes about the same total time and you finish, because each pass is boring in a way you can survive.
Why this job feels heavier than it is
Rebuilding a catalogue is not hard. It is repetitive, and repetitive work is punished by context switching. Doing one product from start to finish means finding a file, writing a title, deciding a price, hunting for an image, resizing it, and then choosing where it goes on the page. That is six different kinds of attention. Multiply by forty and you are not doing forty tasks, you are doing 240 gear changes.
The genuinely hard part is not the typing either. It is the decisions you have been avoiding, and they surface the moment you touch the catalogue. Three products overlap and should probably be one bundle. Two have never sold and you know why. Four have prices you set in a different year. A rebuild drags all of that into the light, which is useful and also exhausting, so it helps to know in advance that you will hit it and to have a rule ready: this pass is for moving things across, not for improving them.
There is one exception worth making. If a product genuinely does not deserve to exist, do not rebuild it. Deleting nine listings is the fastest possible way to rebuild nine listings.
One long build versus four short passes
The old approach to rebuilding a shop assumes each product is a construction project. On store.fan a product is a row of fields on a page you have already made, which changes what the work is.
| The old way | With store.fan |
|---|---|
| Every product needs its own page, layout and checkout wiring | Add the product and it joins the same storefront, statically rendered with its own title and description |
| A download, a course, a booking and a physical item mean three or four separate tools | Ten product types on one page, added the same way |
| Revising a file means re-uploading and emailing everyone who already bought | Replace the file and it updates for everyone who has bought it |
| Nothing can go live until the design is settled | Publish as you go, then apply a theme to everything at once from the designer |
| Adding more listings costs more, per item or per plan tier | 0% platform fee on every plan, so a bigger catalogue costs nothing extra to hold |
| Half-finished migrations get abandoned because the finish line is a single date | Four passes, each with a visible end, so stopping mid-way still leaves you further ahead |
The four passes
Each pass has one kind of thinking in it. Set a timer if that helps. Nothing here needs a paid plan, because the full storefront designer and unlimited link cards are on the Free plan.
- 1Pass one, files. Make a single folder on your desktop and put every deliverable in it, named exactly as the product will be called. No uploading yet. This is the pass that finds the three files you cannot locate, and finding them early is the whole point.
- 2Pass two, text and price. Open a spreadsheet with four columns: product name, short description, price, product type. Fill in all forty rows in one sitting, copying from your old listings. Deciding forty prices in a row is quicker and more consistent than deciding one price forty separate times.
- 3Pass three, entry. Now open the dashboard and create the products, working straight down your spreadsheet. Paste the title, paste the description, type the price, upload the matching file from the folder. This pass is mindless on purpose, and it is the one you can do while half-watching something.
- 4Pass four, images. Add cover images to all of them in one go. Doing every image at once is what makes a page look designed rather than assembled, because you notice when one is a different crop or colour temperature.
- 5Then the designer. Pick a theme, a layout and a font, set the cover photo, and reorder so your three best sellers sit at the top. Ten minutes at the end, on a page with something in it, beats an hour at the start on an empty one.
What forty products actually costs in time
Rough figures from a catalogue of that size, assuming the products already exist somewhere and you are not rewriting them. Pass one, finding and renaming files, takes about an hour and produces the most swearing. Pass two, the spreadsheet, is about ninety minutes, and half of that is prices. Pass three, entry, runs at roughly two minutes a product once you have a rhythm, so a little over an hour with a break. Pass four, images, is another hour if the images exist and considerably longer if you are making them.
That is somewhere near five hours, which is a weekday evening plus a Saturday morning rather than a lost weekend. More importantly, you can stop after any pass and still be better off than when you started, because a finished pass is a finished thing. The version where you build products one at a time has no such property: stop halfway and you have nineteen products and a page that looks unfinished to anyone who visits.
Claim your page first, add three products tonight, and let the other thirty-seven arrive in passes over the week.
Start your storefrontThe mistake most people make
They start with the design. It is the pleasant part, so it goes first, and two hours disappear into fonts on a page with nothing to look at. Then the catalogue work begins with the tank empty. Reverse it and the designer becomes the reward at the end, chosen against real content, which is also when your layout choice is actually informed. The second version of the mistake is rebuilding everything before publishing anything. Publish the first six. A live page teaches you things a draft cannot, and you can read what the paid tiers add on the pricing page once you know what you are building.
Yes, if what is published looks deliberate. Six good products with images and a theme reads as a small shop. Forty products where half have no cover image reads as a broken one. Publish a finished-looking subset and grow it.
They live on the same page. Physical orders collect a full address and a flat delivery fee you name, shown before payment. You ship the parcel yourself, because store.fan never touches it and does not generate carrier labels or tracking, so factor your own posting time into the plan.
Yes. Replacing the file updates it for everyone who already bought, and they can return to their private order page to get the new version. That is worth knowing during a rebuild, because it means a slightly wrong upload in pass three is not a disaster.
Not really, and be sceptical of anything that promises otherwise. What you can do is cut the catalogue first. Most people rebuilding forty listings find that twenty-eight of them account for nearly all the interest, and the rest were kept out of politeness to their past selves.
Catalogue work is not creative work and pretending otherwise is why it never gets done. Give it the treatment you would give any repetitive job: same action, many times, in a sitting with an end. Four passes later the whole thing is on one page, and the only decision left is which theme suits it. If you are moving from somewhere else, the migration notes cover the parts that sit outside the catalogue.
Open an account, make the folder, and start the first pass before you talk yourself out of it again.
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