Add/Edit Your Tube Offerings

General

This page provides a Tube supplier with a two options to add his Tube to the Multi-Supplier Inventory. The first option is to add Tube offerings individually. This section also lets a supplier edit or delete individual offerings. The second option involves uploading an Excel file containing descriptions of your Tube offerings. Tube offerings in the uploaded file is added automatically. After Tube Offerings are added, new Offerings are sent to buyers who have signed up to Receive Tube Offerings by email.

Individual Tube Offerings

The form is used to add information describing your Tube Offering. The Type, Dimensions, Footage, Pieces, Description, Price, Tag No and Location fields are used to describe each of your Tube offerings. The Type, Dimensions and Location are required fields. Dimensions is in inches and can be specified as a decimal or fraction. Location is where the Tube is physically located. The city and state abbreviation (or city and province abbreviation, if Canada) is separated by a comma. Units for the Price, unless otherwise identified, is US$ per foot. Any information about your Tube that is not specific to the other fields goes in the Description field.

Pre-Processing

We added a Pre-processing option that could be helpful to try to fill in some of the fields in the form. Copy the information describing your Tube into the provided Pre-Process text box and press the "Pre-Process" button. The site will try to recognize the type, dimensions, location, price and Footage from the description provided in the Pre-Process text box . Recognized fields will be placed in the appropriate fields and the remainder will be inserted in the Description field. Make any needed changes to the form and press the "Insert Tube" button to add your Tube to the Inventory. For example, the site is looking for a "$" or "/ft" to identify the price and "'" of FT to identify the Footage. It is looking for a number of terms separated by an "X" for the Dimensions. A number in parentheses is assumed to be the number of pieces. It also tries to find the location (City, State).

Multiple Tube Offerings

A Tube supplier can also add, edit and remove Tube offerings by uploading an Excel spreadsheet containing descriptions of his Tube offerings. Each offering is described on a single row. Steel Spider reads the file a row at a time and adds the offerings to our Inventory automatically. The location and order of columns containing the data about each offering determines how the file is processed. The supplier provides a file with the layout defined by the supplier. This supplier defined layout file is usually a file that the supplier is already preparing or is easily exported from the suppliers inventory database. It is usually an Excel file. Under certain circumstances we can handle a text file or an Adobe .pdf file.

Supplier Specified Column Layout Excel File (or Text File) - Automatic Data Entry Process

If you are considering using this Automatic Data Entry Process you need to Register first and then attach your Tube inventory file to John@steelspider.com. We need to set-up the site to recognize the layout and other information about your file before you an use this. There is no charge to set this up and we provide a free trial period so you can evaluate using this method for adding your Tube Offerings to the Inventory.

The file format can be Excel but in some cases we can handle Text, Word or Adobe PDF. Send what you use internally. We will test the processing of the file on the site so we can recommend the simplest way to add your Tube and walk you through the process. If your company uses codes or abbreviations, such as for location or grades, let us know what the codes represent and we can set up the site to recognize these and replace them with alternative terms that describe your Tube. You can keep the codes in your file and will not need to convert them. This makes it possible for us to handle your inventory data without you having to do much "clean up" of the data. Using this method of providing your Tube offerings also lets us do more to tailor how your offerings appear and provide more information than is available with the other methods. For example if your have pictures of your Tube offering on your website, we can include a link to the applicable picture with the offering.