When a file beats typing
Adding five products by hand is quick. Adding sixty is an afternoon, and the sixtieth has a typo in the price. If your catalogue already lives in a spreadsheet, or you can export it from wherever you sell today, loading it from a file is faster and easier to check.
The file route also pays off later. A price change across a whole category is one edited column and one upload, not sixty forms.
Prepare the spreadsheet
Open the products page of your shop in the BotLaunch dashboard and choose the import option. It offers a template. Download it, open it in Excel or Google Sheets, and you will see the columns the shop reads: SKU, name, description, category, price, compare-at price, stock, status and image link.
Fill in one row per product. A few habits save trouble:
- Give every product a SKU, a short code of your own such as TEE-BLK-M. It is what lets you update that product from a file later.
- Write prices as plain numbers, 19.90 or 19,90. Leave out thousands separators: a value like 1,234 can be read two ways, so the shop refuses it and asks you to write 1234.
- A new product needs at least a name and a price. Everything else can wait.
- Keep one product per row. If a bag comes in three colours and you list them separately, that is three rows and three products.
When the sheet is ready, save it as CSV. In Excel that is File, Save As, CSV. In Google Sheets it is File, Download, CSV.
Load the file and read the preview
Choose the file in the import window. Nothing is written to your shop yet. You get a preview with three numbers: new products, products that will be updated, and rows with errors. Below it is the list of what the file contains.
If a row has a problem, the preview names the row and says what is wrong: a price that is not a number, a product with no name, a value that is too large. While the file has errors, nothing is saved. Fix those rows in the spreadsheet, save the CSV again and choose it once more. This is deliberate. A half-loaded catalogue is harder to repair than a file you correct and reload.
When the error count is zero, confirm the upload. The products appear in your list, and buyers see the active ones in your Telegram shop.
Updating products with the same file
The SKU decides what happens to a row. If the shop already has a product with that SKU, the row updates it. If not, the row adds a new product. So your spreadsheet can stay the master copy: change a price or a stock number there, load the file again, and only those values change.
You can also go the other way. The shop exports its products and orders as CSV files, which gives you a starting sheet that already has your SKUs in it. Edit that export and load it back.
One file holds up to 2,000 rows. Loading the same file twice does not create duplicates, because the second time every row matches an existing SKU.
What the file does not change
Your plan's product limit still applies. The Free Mini App plan covers up to 10 products, Starter at $19 a month covers up to 100, and Growth at $49 a month covers up to 1,000. If a file would take you past the limit, the preview tells you before anything is saved, so you can trim the file or change plan first.
The file sets the facts about a product. The look of your shop, its design, blocks and categories layout, stays in the editor. And orders are still fulfilled by you: the shop takes the order inside Telegram, and you confirm, pack and deliver.
A first run that takes ten minutes
Start small. Put three real products in the template, load it, and look at the preview and then at the shop on your phone. Once those three look right, add the rest of the catalogue to the same sheet and load it again. The first three rows simply update, and the new rows are added.
If you have not opened a shop yet, the Telegram Mini App store page shows what buyers see, and the pricing page lists the product limits per plan.