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Creating a new kit via bulk

Modified on: Thu, Apr 4, 2024 at 1:57 PM

In order to create a kit, all of its components must first exist. For example, if we're going to create a skateboard kit composed of a deck, trucks and wheels, the deck, the trucks and the wheels must already individually exist in SureDone and have unique GUIDs for each component.

Please note that you CANNOT include a kit or bundle inside another kit at this time. For example, if you want to create a wheel and tire kit consisting of four wheels and four tires, you cannot use a bundle of wheels and a bundle of tires to create this. Instead, you will create the kit with 4 wheels and 4 tires.

The primary steps for creating a kit are:

Make sure each of your components exists
Create a bulk file and fill out a row like you would for a normal product (i.e. SKU, Title, Description, etc.)
Add two new columns - "iskit" and "kitlinks"
Set the value of the "iskit" column to 1 for the product
Put the components and quantities of each into the "kitlinks" column in a JSON format
Submit the bulk file.

We'll walk you through each step here. We'll use the skateboard example for this (we know there are more parts than just the deck, trucks and wheels, but we're going to just pretend there aren't for this example).

Step 1

First, we make sure each of our components exist inside our SureDone account. Looks like they do!

Step 2

Now we need to create a bulk file containing a line for the finished product. This gets filled out just like we normally would.

Step 3

We've added "iskit" and "kitlinks" as columns to this bulk sheet (as seen above).

Step 4

Set the value of "iskit" to 1 so that SureDone knows this line represents a kit.

Step 5

Now comes the fun part where we actually build the kit.

If you look at our picture above of the deck, truck and wheels, you'll see that each one has a defined GUID:

Deck - 101001079001a
Truck - INDETRUCK
Wheels (Package of 2) - 608ZZ

We need to create an entry for the kitlinks column that ties these all together. We're going to use a special format called JSON in order to do this.

Since we're going to need 1 deck, 2 trucks and 2 wheel sets (since they are a package of 2 each), this is what our final entry will look like:

[["101001079001a",1],["INDETRUCK",2],["608ZZ",2]]

Breaking that down, we have a list of elements contained within square brackets. Each element contains one GUID, in quotes, and one quantity. The GUID tells SureDone which of your existing components should be part of the kit, and the quantity tells SureDone how many of that component are included in every kit. Each element is separated by commas, and also enclosed in square brackets.

There are three separate elements in the kitlinks field above, which matches up with the three components in our skateboard kit.

The first is (quantity 1 of 101001079001a):

["101001079001a",1]

The second is (quantity 2 of INDETRUCK):

["INDETRUCK",2]

And the third one is (quantity 2 of 608ZZ):

["608ZZ",2]

You separate each of these elements with commas and wrap the whole thing in brackets so it looks like:

[["101001079001a",1],["INDETRUCK",2],["608ZZ",2]]

The order of these elements does not matter. The important part is associating each GUID with its correct quantity.

Note that you aren't limited to just 3 items in a kit. You can have as many as you want. We just happen to be using 3 items for our particular kit.

As we mentioned before, we're using a special format called JSON to show what goes into a kit. When you have a lot of items in your kit it may become a big jumble. To verify that your JSON is correct, you can go to http://jsonlint.com/, paste in your complete JSON entry and click on the "Validate JSON" button at the bottom. It will then tell you whether you have an error or whether everything is great.

Also, be sure when creating your CSV files that the editor you're using isn't replacing your straight quotes (") with angled quotes. This can cause you to receive the following error: "kitlinks:96 - Incorrect format for linking items to kits, must be valid JSON" when you upload the file. If you are receiving this error and you've confirmed that the value in the kitlinks field is valid JSON, this may be an indication that something has gone wrong with the formatting of the straight quotes (") in your CSV file.

So now we're going to paste our JSON into our bulk sheet:

Now, as usual, we'll save this file as a CSV.

Step 6

Upload the bulk file to SureDone like you normally would (see Bulk Processing for more information if you haven't done bulk, or visit our online learning center for comprehensive training on bulk).

Completion

Go back into your All Products view of SureDone and you should see your new kit. At this point there will not be an indicator that this is a kit, but this will be adjusted at a later time once we build kits and bundles into our standard user interface.

Please note if the components of your kit have stock coming from other vendors, you will need to add the vendor stock in Settings > Selling under the Kit Stock Options section and save settinsg

Creating a kit via bulk - with items already existing in SureDone.

While creating a kit with items already existing in SureDone, you need to use the bulk file in below format (action=edit) and ensure that "Force" option is checked on Bulk upload page - while submitting your bulk file.