We have extended the features of our bulk UPC validator/extractor. Now you can not only submit a block of text, list etc. and extract all the (valid) UPCs from it, but they will now also be submitted to our engine for indexing.
This is going to be really useful for sellers with lists of UPCs they want to add to our site in order to get exposure for their products. You can literally just copy your UPC column from your spreadsheet and paste it into the field provided and press Extract.
However, we need to note a few things:
- Our UPC lookup service only works with UPCs of products that are already sold online somewhere. We will trawl all the retailers we have access to (most of the big ones) to find product information but if we can’t find it then we can’t index it. Your best bet is if your products are listed on Amazon. We don’t currently have a facility for you to submit full product information – we need to be able to find the product online so we can list current prices etc., so we probably aren’t going to be offering a full data import service any time soon – it would require manual curation on our part as well, to eliminate spam etc., and frankly we just don’t feel like doing that right now.
- It is not yet possible to check on the progress of your submissions, other than by clicking on the on-page links provided when you perform the initial extraction. We will soon be adding a feature where you can check on whether your submissions have been indexed yet.
Indexing is currently very slow, we are working on that though. It’s way faster now, but we have placed our own limit in order to control the load on our server – 100 UPCs will take around 10-15 minutes to process provided you are at the front of the queue.- Indexing by our site does NOT mean indexing by Google!! Valid UPCs that actually correspond to products will be added to our index and to our sitemap. However there is no guarantee that Google will pick them up – if we knew how to make them do that we’d be rich, I tell you!
So this is still a work in progress, but we are well on the way to being able to allow users to submit UPCs and then check on the progress of indexing. In future maybe even to export a file with product data when the indexing process is finished, since this is something people often ask for (though we may have to charge a small fee for that service, the data is free, but server time and space is not, unfortunately).
Let us know if you find any bugs with this or have any features to suggest, happy extracting!