Magento

After much trial and error i’ve managed to get our 300 products to import wonderfully using dataflow, the only problem I still have is setting up a “grouped product” import, as doing them by hand is almost next to impossible for a high volume of products. Do you guys plan on having special product import support using dataflow? Can anyone suggest a way to group these products via the db perhaps as using the built in magento admin menu has proven to be too time consuming?

Thanks in advance for any input or suggestions you may have to offer

cmirra,

any tips on how you were able to get those products to import “wonderfully” using the dataflow module?

cmirra, can you detail how you were able to get the product to import “wonderfully”?

Does someone know how Dataflow should work? I am actually using oscommerce. My Distributor offers me a csv file with all categories, products a.s.o. So the import feature should normally work if I would upload the file to Magento Data Flow. But it just does not. Is there any possibility to create new categories with such a file which already contains those categories. I cannot find something in the field mappings what could match that case. Is it until now only possible to import products in available categories or is there any possibility to create automatically new categories provided by the csv-file?

I’ve not found a way to import categories.  I maybe in error, but I can only import products so far.

Anyone with a way to import grouped Products and their associated products too?

Thank you all
Yiannis

Importing wonderfully .... import products from a CSV ... import configurable products from a CSV .. Problems importing products .. Import products errors ..

After much trial and error I now don’t seem to have many headaches with the import process itself for both simple and configurable products.  Here are a couple of tips. Sorry if they seem obvious. It would be interesting to know if anyone is still having problems after using these guidelines.

1 Create a simple product, in an empty Magento database ... delete your existing products if necessary… make sure that you fill in a value for EVERY option, otherwise when you export later some columns in the database may be missing.

2 Export the database using system/importexport/profiles/ make sure that “Keep original Magento values in the first row” is ticked. This will ensure that you have the attributes.

3 You should now have a spreadsheet showing the attributes in the first row, and the values of the product you created in the second row.  Try creating a second product by inserting values in row 3 in the spreadsheet.

4 Save the file as a CSV. and upload it.  You should be able to see the product you created directly in the spreadsheet in row 3.

5 If you have already created your product spreadsheet, then make sure that you have the same values for the column headings as appeared in the spreadsheet you exported in step2.  AND IN THE SAME ORDER.  I have found this to be more important with configurable products for some reason. Failure to respect the order that columns appear in may result in data being transferred to the wrong column. IE the weight value may end up in the price column.

I have read in other posts that some people have had more success using files generated using Open Office rather than Microsoft Excel.
http://www.openoffice.org/ It’s free.

Points of note:

While testing it is best to use a product list of no more than around 10 products, to avoid waiting for a large list to upload. Once you have successfully uploaded you can try a larger list.

You must manually create an attribute using the Magento interface for all columns that you have in the database.  A database column that has an unknown or uncreated attribute in row 1 will cause an upload failure. So, if you have a column in your product list that is called
“nrf_code” you must create an attribute called “nrf_code” — NO QUOTE MARKS

Column headings should only use letters numbers and the underscore character “_” .... I use only lower case letter as well.

I had a problem where one column was not exporting..  It turned out that I had created an attribute called “product_id” and that using “id” in the name was causing the problem.  There may be other reserved phrases that should not be used in column headings.

I had a problem trying to use ‘ in a product name.  “It’s a wrap” caused the upload to fail. We changed it to “Its a wrap” and the upload went perfectly.  We havent tried to find a workaround for this problem yet.

That’s about it. I hope this helps someone.

Pat

http://www.mooam.com

Any dice with importing configurable products ?

Powdermonkey - 16 July 2008 11:03 PM

I had a problem trying to use ‘ in a product name.  “It’s a wrap” caused the upload to fail. We changed it to “Its a wrap” and the upload went perfectly.  We havent tried to find a workaround for this problem yet.

Powdermonkey,

Try “It\’s a wrap” instead of just “It’s a wrap” : that resolved same problems I had.