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This is the wall most shop owners hit. You’ve decided to start using an app to run your shop. You open it, ready to go, and then you remember: you have three hundred products. The thought of adding them one at a time, typing each name, each price, each unit, three hundred times, is enough to make you close the app and go back to the notebook.
So let’s get one thing straight. You are not going to add three hundred products one by one. Nobody does that. You’re going to bring them all in at once from a spreadsheet, check them on screen, and have your whole shop live before the afternoon is over. Here’s exactly how.
The shortcut: import, don’t type
A bulk import takes a spreadsheet of your products and turns it into your live catalogue in one move. Instead of three hundred separate entries, you fill in one list, upload it, confirm it looks right, and you’re done. The work that felt like a week becomes the work of an afternoon, and most of that afternoon is just gathering your prices.
If your products are already in an Excel sheet, you’re most of the way there. If they’re in a notebook, you’ll type them into a spreadsheet once, which is far faster than entering them into an app one form at a time, and you keep the spreadsheet as a bonus backup.
What to put in your spreadsheet
You don’t need a perfect, complicated sheet. You need the handful of things that make a product sellable. For each product, a row with:
- Product name — what you and your staff call it. “Raw Shea Butter,” “Coconut Oil 1L,” “Paracetamol 500mg.”
- Category — the group it belongs to, so your catalogue isn’t one long list. Oils, butters, packaging, and so on.
- How you sell it — the unit that leaves your shop. Piece, bottle, carton, bag, sachet, kg. This is the unit your customer pays for.
- Cost price — what you pay your supplier for it. This is the number that lets the app calculate your real profit later, so don’t skip it.
- Selling price — what the customer pays.
- Quantity in stock — how many you have right now, from the snapshot count you took.
That’s the core. Get those six columns right and every product is ready to sell the moment it lands.
Set your prices once, while you’re here
You’re already in the spreadsheet thinking about every product. This is the perfect moment to set your prices properly instead of working them out in your head at the counter later.
If you sell the same product to walk-ins, to regulars, and to bulk buyers at different rates, set those tiers now. Many shops lose real money by charging one price to three kinds of buyer who cost very different amounts to serve. Sorting it out in the import means you never have to guess a price mid-sale again.
And double-check your cost prices while you’re at it. The cost is the column that turns sales into profit. A wrong cost makes every profit number wrong, so it’s worth getting right once, here, rather than discovering it’s off three months from now.
Upload, then preview before anything goes live
Here’s the step that separates a good import from a stressful one: the preview. A solid bulk import doesn’t dump your spreadsheet straight into your live shop. It shows you what it’s about to create, on screen, first.
This is where you catch the typos. A price with a missing zero. A product in the wrong category. A unit that says “carton” where you meant “piece.” You scan the preview, fix anything that looks off, and only then confirm. Nothing wrong ever reaches your live records, because you saw it before it landed. Take the two minutes to actually read the preview. It’s far easier to fix a row on screen than to hunt down a wrong price after you’ve been selling on it for a week.
Start with your best sellers if you’re in a hurry
You don’t even have to do all three hundred in one sitting. If you want to be selling within the hour, start with the twenty or thirty products that make up most of your sales. Import those first. Your shop’s most important stock is now live, and you can sell on it immediately while you add the slow movers over the next few days.
This is also the gentlest way in if a spreadsheet feels like a lot. Best sellers first, everything else as you go. The app is useful from the very first import, not only once every last item is in.
After the import: your first sale
Once your products are in and the preview looks right, you confirm, and your catalogue is live. Now ring one sale. Pick a product, add it to the cart, take payment. Watch the stock drop by one automatically. That single sale is the moment the whole thing clicks, because you’ve just seen the app do, in one tap, what used to take a notebook entry, a mental calculation, and a hope that you remembered to write it down.
From there, every sale keeps your stock accurate, your profit calculated, and your records straight. The afternoon you spent on the import pays you back every single day after.
Get your whole shop live today
The setup wall is real, but it’s thinner than it looks. It’s one spreadsheet, one upload, one preview, and a first sale. Not three hundred forms.
Mayloo imports your whole catalogue from a spreadsheet, shows you a full preview before anything goes live so you catch errors first, and lets you set Retail, Wholesale, and Bulk prices right in the import. Bring in your best sellers first or your entire shop at once, then ring your first sale and watch the stock update on its own. If you’re making the move from a notebook, this is the step that makes the rest easy, the natural next move after taking your snapshot and starting the handover.