e-commerce product selection

Purpose The purpose of this project is to select products from wholesaler catalogues. for an ecommerce store that will be selling adult products. The site will be specifically targeted towards the gay male community and will hosted on Magento. Essential Skills/Knowledge The successful freelancer should be comfortable working with this content. The main task for the freelancer is to go through the wholesale catalogue of two suppliers and to choose appropriate products to upload to the store based on a specific criteria. This project requires a freelancer who is technically competent in research and analysis and has very strong attention to detail. The freelancer will need to work autonomously and exercise sound judgement. The brand will be catering to the hardcore/extreme/fetish end of the gay sex / BDSM market. The freelancer will need to be comfortable working with such content. They should also be knowledgeable and informed about the various different types of adult products that are available, particularly those favoured by gay men. The reason for this is that the freelancer will need to place selected products into relevant categories. They will also need to be able to identify similar items even when the wholesalers have used different terminology. Outcomes The freelancer will be provided with login details for the catalogues from the two wholesalers; Eldorado and Sex Toys Distributing, They will also be provided with a category map that will step out the categories and subcategories used in the store. The freelancer will then systematically go through the two catalogues to identify relevant products based on the following criteria. Eldorado currently have around 17,000 products in their catalogue and Sex Toys distributing have around 3,500. Although these numbers sound daunting, there are whole parent categories of products (such as lingerie, that are not relevant to the intended customer group. This will reduce the number of products to sort through considerably. The freelancer will submit a single MS Excel (or similar) spreadsheet that gives the following data for each product selected: • Name of Product • UPC number • Supplier (Sex Toys or Eldorado) • Subcategories the products should be mapped to. In many cases more than one subcategory will be relevant and product she be mapped to ALL relevant subcategories Product Selection Criteria 1. All products from both suppliers contain a series of product images. It photos only have females in them, the product should not be selected. This is because this store is intended to cater gay men. If theirs is a product you believe is essential to include and the only barrier to inclusion is the use of female models in the images you may add it and a note next to the entry saying ‘no appropriate product pics.’ If the photo’s have no humans but just show the product, this is ok to include. 2. A significant number of products should be selected to fill each of the subcategories with a substantial range of quality products. If similar versions of the same item already exist preference should be given to the best quality version. 3. Where possible complete sets and full product ranges should be maintained. Eg, if a selected butt plug is available S,M or L, the all three products should be included. 4. The freelancer will need to use a level of judgement when deciding whether or not to include them. Although in many cases stocking different brand versions of the same product would have overkill, while in other cases, eg. Personal lubricants, would be essential