Import products from an xls spreadsheet into eCommerce
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Hi.
I need to price up a job for a customer. They have around 6,000 products over multiple brands, but don't want to add each product manually via eCommerce. They can however, export the products in an excel spreadsheet (1 spreadsheet per brand) which will have product details and the name of the image which they will also want to mass-update. I need to source this type of work out to someone that can build me a solution where the customer can use these spreadsheets and it will populate the products in eCommerce?
The images I can mass update via the File Manager and placing them in a FTP server location?!
I've attached an example spreadsheet which I've told the customer each column MUST be the same across all brands...
I need to price up a job for a customer. They have around 6,000 products over multiple brands, but don't want to add each product manually via eCommerce. They can however, export the products in an excel spreadsheet (1 spreadsheet per brand) which will have product details and the name of the image which they will also want to mass-update. I need to source this type of work out to someone that can build me a solution where the customer can use these spreadsheets and it will populate the products in eCommerce?
The images I can mass update via the File Manager and placing them in a FTP server location?!
I've attached an example spreadsheet which I've told the customer each column MUST be the same across all brands...
Have they got anything in eCommerce already? If not, we built an import tool that should be able to handle the import for you.
Hi Tooq,
No the database will be empty.
Andy
No the database will be empty.
Andy
Fire me an email and I'll send you the package. I haven't actually tested the package format, but we used the guts to set up an eComm package for a client and decided we would package for the marketplace. All I know is that running it with existing products will wipe the existing products out, so fair warning.
Please let me know if you run into any issues or have any feedback.
Thanks,
Brian
brian@mytooq.com
Please let me know if you run into any issues or have any feedback.
Thanks,
Brian
brian@mytooq.com
FYI, I did this on one site. There's a package in the marketplace that can do it and is a good starting point, however...
It's really, *really* tricky to get it working. The thing is that on each import, it removes and re-adds the attributes for each product. You kind of have to do this, if say, you have a shoe that comes in different sizes and need to make sure that only in stock options are displayed when ordering.
What this means is that the orders that are already created end up no longer having their data. You don't know what people ordered.
We were able to get around it partially by using a custom attribute type based on the select attribute. Each option had an 'active' flag for display on the front end.
It also needed to have file sets for each import, and a fork to the file set model to actually delete the files when you delete the set. Otherwise, you end up with orphan images in the files directory.
Eventually, we also had to move from a dashboard page to command line PHP and a cron job to run it. The import process just took too long.
All said, the project took at least 5x more than we bid. And we swore to never *ever* do something like that again.
It's really, *really* tricky to get it working. The thing is that on each import, it removes and re-adds the attributes for each product. You kind of have to do this, if say, you have a shoe that comes in different sizes and need to make sure that only in stock options are displayed when ordering.
What this means is that the orders that are already created end up no longer having their data. You don't know what people ordered.
We were able to get around it partially by using a custom attribute type based on the select attribute. Each option had an 'active' flag for display on the front end.
It also needed to have file sets for each import, and a fork to the file set model to actually delete the files when you delete the set. Otherwise, you end up with orphan images in the files directory.
Eventually, we also had to move from a dashboard page to command line PHP and a cron job to run it. The import process just took too long.
All said, the project took at least 5x more than we bid. And we swore to never *ever* do something like that again.
