Eminent Style

Applies to 1.3.2.3

I have recently been importing a customers products into Magento with varying success. Hopefully this post will point you in the right direction to avoid many of the pitfalls I have discovered.

I have found that the best way to import your products into Magento is to manually create a single product in each category, export the csv file of products, edit the CSV for the new products and then import again.

Export

1. From the Admin Panel. ‘System’ -> ‘Import / Export’ -> ‘Profiles’.
2. Select ‘Export All Products’
3. Click ‘Run Profile’ from the left hand navigation
4. Click the button ‘Run Profile in Pop Up’
5. Download the export from your ‘\var\export\’ directory.

Import

1. After editing and inserting your products, save the file as something like ‘Import Products.csv
2. From the Admin Panel. ‘System’ -> ‘Import / Export’ -> ‘Profiles’.
3. Click ‘Import All Products’
4. Click ‘Upload File’ from the left hand navigation
5. Click ‘Browse’, select the file and then click ‘Save and Continue Edit’
6. Select ‘Run Profile’ from the left hand navigation and select the uploaded csv file from the select box. It will have been renamed.
7. Click the button ‘Run Profile in Pop Up’
8. Take note of any products that are skipped.

Notes

• If you have recently upgraded Magento, some of the field titles and values may have changed. For example, make sure the ‘store’, ‘website’ and ‘type’ fields are lower case.
• Some fields are mandatory like ‘SKU’ and ‘weight’
• ‘tax_class_id’ and ‘visability’ fields are now uppercase
• Regarding images, even if you have the same image for the main image, small image and thumbnail, Magento appears to need different values in here. e.g. productimage1.jpg, productimage1-sm.jpg and productimage1-th.jpg

Hopefully this will clear up some of the issues with importing large quatities of products into Magento.

I am happy to offer this import service if requried on your install of Magento. Please contact me for a quote.