Magento

This is not a feature.

If you upload a file with items listed for deletion from your website, Magento should not throw you an error when some of those items are not found in the file.  At worst, it should warn you, “some skus were not found.  run import anyway?”

Why in god’s name would Magento require me to remove items from the list of items to remove from my website?  Because they aren’t found on the website?  What?  Hello?  Does this make any sense at all?

How about this:  if the item is found, REMOVE it.  If it is not, GREAT, move on to the next item.

Instead, I have to do a full export of products from the site.  Then I have to use Excel VLOOKUP to find items in my “Remove List” that are in the full export.  Then I remove the ones that come up as #N/A.

Other than the annoying bug I describe above, the import moved at an impressive speed.  I was able to remove several hundred items from the site in about 1 minute.  It doesn’t seem like any reindexing was required afterwards.  Now if Magento can just get their full product import to work half as well as some of the extensions out there, that would be something.

ALSO, it was great that Magento only required a single column for the Delete process (just the sku list).  I was afraid it would ask for all sorts of other random columns, but it didn’t.

I’m sure your tone will garner all due attention for the points you make.

Now if Magento can just get their full product import to work half as well as some of the extensions out there, that would be something.

...for example?

Here’s one example:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/bolasevich/extension/1894/custom-bulk-product-import-+-export-with-tier-pricing--product-custom-options--configurable-products--bundle-products--grouped-products--downloadable
It handles every kind of product import beautifully except images. 

It should not be that hard to program Magento’s import system to handle multi-valued fields for importing things like related products, multiple categories, multi-valued attributes (e.g. an item with two colors), etc.  It’s just simple string parsing.  Handling image update vs. add vs. delete is only slightly more complex, and that hasn’t been done either.

In this newest version, you can import multiple spelled-out categories, apparently, but in a really silly and clunky way.

1.) You have to list each additional category on its own line beneath the main line for the item.
2.) It won’t create a new category if the specified category does not exist.

And it should not take an hour to import 1,000 products.  I know that FINALLY in this latest version Magento is waking up to the fact that direct MySQL queries are at least 100x faster than using whatever labyrinthine object-oriented PHP methods they were using before.  That’s a great first step.  I just don’t understand why it wasn’t taken somewhere around version 0.1 and perfected by 1.0.  How can you put out an ecommerce “solution” that requires everyone who uses to it spend hundreds of hours (and dollars) wrangling with it just to get a consistent set of steps for data import?  What good are order management improvements or “The Find” feeds if there are no products to find!?

Anyway, I dream of a day when I can churn out a comma-delimited, UTF-8 encoded spreadsheet containing 5,000 lines for Magento, with related items, multiple categories, multi-valued attributes, image updates and new images all mixed in and the whole thing runs to completion on 5 minutes.  That would be great.  Maybe by version 3 or 4 we will get that. 

(Alternatively, U RapidFlow by Unirgy claims to do all that right now, but it doesn’t look like he’s updated for version 1.5. http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/Unirgy/extension/3047/urapidflow
Also, this has to be the longest thread in all the magento forums, “The Quest For an Efficient Product Import Script” and yet magento has given the import function LAST priority: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/201210/P1260/)

Hi, I’m not sure if this can help, but I created an adapter for single row csv files, that handle multi-valued fields.

In addition, this post talk about UTF-8: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewreply/319133/

Please take a look at http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/227005/

Regards,

@amartinez

Thanks for the links.  Your import script looks promising.  I will check it out.

You’re welcome! Please report me any issue…

Bing Dicklepuss - 02 May 2011 11:42 PM

@amartinez

Thanks for the links.  Your import script looks promising.  I will check it out.