Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I have a very small online clothing store right now. I would like to grow but the labor costs involved are a little too high. The main labor costs are taking pictures and describing the clothing. Does anyone know of a centralized database that I can just pull the info from?

I figure brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Guess and other brands want to make sure their products are represented the right way and so they would provide pictures and descriptions that help their brand. I might be wrong about that, but it just seems like something I would do if I made clothing. 

I was thinking about just writing a program that would index a few retail websites and just grab the info from them and save it to my database. I would rather have a company provide me with the information even if I have to pay for it.

I would love whatever help I can get. Thank you!

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Hi Imma,

Labor is so cheap write now and there is a ton of value in writing your own content I would just hire a cheap freelance worker to start building out your database of product descriptions and pictures for you.  It would actually probably cost you less then buying the information from someone (who did the same thing as hire cheap labor and then charged you a premium for the service/database).  If you are not that big of an operation as you mention this is even easier.  Plus everything will be customize and when you add new products they can always be covered by your employee not matter what.  I would absolutely not do it any differently.

Scraping or automatically pulling product descriptions directly from a manufacturer's website is a bad idea.

 

Not only will your content be unoriginal to the website visitor, but you'll have the same exact descriptions as a ton of your competitor sites. Chances are this will also hurt your search engine ranking.

Write up a template of how you want your product descriptions to look. Then either do it yourself, or find a decent copywriter to do the task.

 

For example:

 

Item description, blah blah blah.

Reasons you'll love this X Brand shirt

    *Reason 1

    *Reason 2

 

Recap items selling points, details, etc.

 

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Go to your local college/university and hire a college student to take the pictures part time.  Won't cost much and students are always willing to learn!

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Hire some students to help you with you work.It is not too expensive for you to hire them,and they want to learn from the work.Maybe you can try.

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Of course, looping through the result set you'll have to check if you're dealing with the right data .

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