Understating & Using the XML feed

Style Volume provides its users with CVS and XML Feeds. This article explains what the more powerful XML feed can do for you and how to get the most out of our dropshipping program using this feed.

Adding products to your site manually and updating them can be very time consuming and use up valuable time, which could be invested in marketing your website, establishing your customer base and generating revenue. So how can you save this precious time and use it for the more important activities?  Is it possible to completely automate this entire dropshipping process, so that you never have to add products manually, check stock levels manually, remove and add products on updates and automate other features related to inventory management? The answer is Yes. This can be done through the power of an XML feed provided by Style Volume.

In simple non-technical terms, an XML feed would help your website communicate with ours in order to update product information, stock levels, automate the ordering process, and lots more. To get more technical information on what XML is, please read the following article from XML.com

A Technical Introduction to XML

Style Volume provides its dropship members with an advanced XML feed and your very own dropshipping control panel, through which each user can personalise the settings for their feed. The feed & control panel would provide you with the following features.

1. Ability to import all products available on stylevolume for dropshipping instantly.

2. Import and put new products live onto your site as soon as they are added on stylevolume with one click.

3. Allow you to define the Margin percentage you want to add on top of our prices.

4. Through your control panel, you can choose which products you want to display on your site, and which ones you do not want.

5. Through your control panel, you can choose which categories you want to display on your site, and which ones you don’t require.

6. When a customer on your site adds an item to their cart, your site will quickly interact with stylevolume to check if that product is in stock, and just in case it isn’t it will show a message to the customer notifying that the product has just gone out of stock. This will ensure that your customer never buys a product from your site that is out of stock. (The likelihood of a product not being in stock is very small and this may happen in very rare cases only. This is because, as soon as the products go out of stock, they will automatically be removed from your site when you update the XML using your Import Script).

7. Ordering Process: When you receive a new order on your website, it will automatically be sent back to Style Volume on your “Incoming Orders” page. So when you login to your account, you can checkout with that order with one click, without having to fill in the all the information such as your customers address, item number, or calculate shipping charges. A copy of the order will also reside on your website.

8. Automatically download all product images from our website to yours.

So you are probably asking, how do I use these great features? In order for you to be able to use Style Volume’s XML Feed you or your programmer will need to code an import script, which can import data from our XML feed. This will require some programming skills. However, if you are not a programmer, you can hire a programmer to write this script for you, and this should be a fairly low cost job. Any programmer with basic PHP skills should be able to do this for you.

If you are serious about running a business online, this will be well worth the investment. This will not only save you time in terms of importing the products for the first time, but automate the entire process, so you never have to spend time checking stock levels, adding new products, and deleting old ones. You can have your Import script to run automatically every X days and go to sleep and your site will keep updating? Isn’t that a dream come true?

Please note that many of the features above are dependent on how you or your coder codes the Import Script. As the script can be coded to do more things than those mentioned above or less, for e.g. you can even make the deletion of images automatic, so that when your site interacts with Style Volume and discovers that a certain product has gone out of stock, it’s Image can automatically be deleted from your website.

If you require Style Volume’s assistance with making your website compatible with ours and use these features, our technical team may be able to help you for an additional charge. This charge varies from site to site, depending on several factors. Please use the form on the contact us page to get in touch with us and send us the following details about your site:

• Your website Link.
• The E-Commerce system the site is running on (Oscommerce, Cube Cart, Custom, etc.)
• Whether you use other drop shipper’s on the same website or not?
• Any other relevant details.

If you hire a programmer or are yourself a programmer, the documentation on the following page will help you to code your import script.

 Style Volume Services Development Documentation

Did You know ?

• You can use the XML Feed even if you have your own products on your website or are using other dropshippers.
• You can use the XML feed to update your Ebay Store and other such online systems with one click.
• Our dropshipping customers using the XML feed tend to be 80% - 100% more successful than those not using one.