As a e-commercer it is important to do PR or marketing if you prefer. And the best way to do this is online and where your customers are when they are in the mood to buy.
One channel to use for PR is Facebook and communicating with the networks of your current customers. Normally an e-commerce site collects customer info at the time for an order and this info contains name, address, cellphone, email and more. Since it’s fairly easy to set up an e-mail account it is also fairly common for customers to e-commerce sites to have a second e-mail-address to use to recieve mail from thoose sites. Usually you don’t have two cellphones though and therefore it is more relevant to use cellphonenumber as primary contact surface since many persons also use their cellphone to visit Facebook and other siter. Don’t neglect the email-adresses though.
As I was helping my lady with this for her e-commerce site we ran into a little issue with the phonenumbers. Facebook wants the list in .csv or .txt format and we did chose the former as format to export from our platform which opened Excel to view the data. Since all phonenumbers in Sweden start with an area code beginning with a zero this meant problem as the initial zero-digit got lost in excel as insignificant for numbers (when the user entered their phonenumber using just digits).
Since I wasn’t to keen on dropping the issue or to manually edit all phonenumbers I decided to find a solution which brings me to my point with this post.
To solve this problem I selected the phone-column in the original .csv-file with all the data and pasted this column into a new excel file in column B. Column A was filled with the digit zero and both column A and B was then selected and formatted as text. In column C (generall format) I added a formula “=Sammanfoga(A2;B2)” which propably is called Merge in English and Voila in C2 the correct phonenumber appeared. This formula was then being multiplied to all rows below taking hold of the cell-border and dragging it downwards. After saving it all it was to much data in the file for Facebook to like so I copied the C column, opened another Excel file and positioned myself in A1 to use Paste special and selecting just values (“Värde” in Swedish) to paste in. Saved it and Done!
Regards Palle
Palle Lilja 