Detailed product information

Sorry if this question has been answered a bunch but I searched for a bit and couldn't find anything quite what I was looking for.

I am a developer at a company and we are making an ecommerce package to extend our existing accounting software and one thing we have kept dodging is the product pages due to lack of information on our products.

What I want to know is where to most small ecommerce sites get their product photos and detailed information on each product? Is it usually entered manually or can you contact the manufacturer or your distributor for this information in some sort of standard format?

Our inventory has about 1,500 active items but some clients have over 20,000 products so manual entry is not an option in most cases.

The ecommerce we are developing is geared mostly towards wholesalers and distributors so we and all of our clients have connections with distributors and manufacturers for purchasing our inventory.

Thanks for any info!

There are two ways to do this

1. hire 4-5 data entry operators and give them data to enter or give them urls of the websites from where to get data
2. Write a crawler to crawl different websites and read data automatically and add it to your site. (this is easier to do)

If your software is aimed at wholesalers you will probably want to consider a bulk product upload facility. We give our retail shop keepers the option of uploading a csv file containing category and product data, that and Xml are the two most popular data formats.

The hardest part we found was product images. You can certainly map a csv field to your database field for the image name but the image upload is a separate process.