Magento

Hi I’d like to start using Magento as my new shopping cart going forward.

Every time I start evaluating the capabilities I get stuck on the import process and give up only to try back again hopping it will be improved in the new version. I have about 14,000 products that need to be updated daily with automation. I still don’t see a feasible way to use the import utility it seems incomplete.

I use D&H;distributing and have the requirement to do daily updates with minimal user intervention. I keep getting stuck on certain missing features.

Images:
3 Image files are required per product: thumb, small, large. The product should create thumb and small with GD2 from the large image, similar to other shopping carts. I have never seen an inventory from a drop shipper with three image fields, how would you automate image sizing? Like Virtuemart for example.

Inventory:
Without the ability to import inventory count there is no way to use the cart in production this is a critical missing feature.

Field enclosure (why is it forcing this on me):
In a comma delimited file how can I remove this requirement, it forcing me to use .xml which requires conversion on my end.

Categories: It seems the categories are not importable. This is a necessary feature without it how do you import more than 10-20 products if you have to manually edit them.

Manufactures: I am completely confused, they don’t import, yet I match the fields up. I edited the attribute and changed it from a drop down to a text field the products appear to import manufacture correctly. Is this documented somewhere?

I agree with the above, especially inventory field addition. Some stores have inventory that change daily. If CSV is the most flexible solution, or the only one available for a company, then it should be pretty flexible on the Magento end, and each could at least be an option. Although I’m sure this could be adapted by the Magento implementor, it makes sense that the csv import feature should be more robust than it is, so hopefully it will even make it to the release candidate, but there’s still quite a bit of work in other areas of M, so on that front, who knows if these features can be implemented either in their entirety or otherwise.

We shall see…

This is something we are working on. It will not be included in the next release but will follow soon.

Thanks

yoav

I’m just putting my pennies worth into this too.  Do we have a ETA on this yet?

yep! a very desired functionality - category import and inventory position update - for almost any e-commerce store ...

I’m all for category and inventory import/export as well. Even more importantly, I want to be able to assign products to categories via an import. Having to go back into each product and manually set the category is a real pain, and slowing my ability to properly set up the site.

I have logged a feature request for the same. Please take a look and offer your suggestions there so that the magento team can prioritize this feature.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/3564/

my vote for an import/export feature which can handle categories, attributes and images!
i really hope the magento team is working on this!

Is this going anywhere? Are we going to have this here in a few days with the release of the cart?

This is the most important thread I have read in the forum. I am committed to using Magento with many many hours invested thus far in my site development. I MUST have a way to import inventory numbers on a daily basis. It’s a feature that I cannot wait for. I have managed to follow every other hack thus far and it seems someone must have come up with a way to do this by now.

Anyone have a procedure laid out yet?

This is the only feature that is keeping us from going full on with implementing Magento into our varied sites.  It seems for such a robust application, an overlooked and simple component such as this, makes me wonder what else is missing?

Does the commercial license version offer this feature?  We have 3 web sites we want to conver to Magento.  But without a intuitive import/export function of inventory, it is useless for us.  We’d rather spend the time and resources correcting our existing commerce application.

Are there any commercial extensions available that will perform this?

We have in total about 30,000 products.

no kidding?  everyday my site is years away from going live because of this stupid design.  i am so ready to use interspire or something else that thought of this basic feature already.  how do they miss this?  i have asked these questions a hundred times on this forum and never get any answers.  it seems that we could just paste some xml into the advanced profiles to be able to import attributes and categories but no one ever answers.  can this be done?