How to import products

How to import products

You may have heaps and heaps of products and creating products manually may be a massive task. In which case you mass import products via a CSV file. A CSV file can be exported from an Excel spreadsheet. Importing products from a CSV file can be tricky, so this tutorial is recommended for advanced users only or people well versed in Microsoft Excel. If you need assistance with product imports we can provide this as an additional service, please contact us. 

This tutorial will be in 2 parts, first is creating your CSV file, and the second part is uploading your CSV file. 

Creating the CSV file

  1. We recommend downloading our starter CSV file which gives you an idea of how your data needs to be structured so that is suitable for uploading. Or alternatively you can create a manual product, and then export your products to get a CSV file of what your typical product(s) look like in a CSV format by going to: https://yourwebsite.com.au/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=product&page=product_exporter (replace yourwebsite.com.au with your actual domain).
  2. Using our starter CSV or your product export file, open up the file in Microsoft Excel or an equivalent program and edit the data as necessary and then save the file as a CSV.
Creating variable products can be particularly challenging using the CSV method, it is recommended to create a variable product manually, doing an export of your products to see how the columns are populated with data and then emulating that. 
Images can be challenging to import as images can't be embedded into the CSV as CSV's are a data only file format. With images what you need to do is upload all the images into your media library and get the URL of the image and put this URL in the Images column. When dealing with lots of images it's often best to use a formula to generate the cell content like ="https://mydomain.com.au/wp-content/2018/02/"&"myimage.jpg".
If your product belongs to multiple categories or tags separate each brand or category in the cell by a comma.
In computer language 1 equates to Yes or True and 0 equates to No or False. You will see in the CSV there are a few 0's and 1's used.
Like any import procedure, what you put in is what you get out. So please be super careful with the data you have in your CSV file and triple check everything. It may be a good idea to do a test import first of just one product to check that everything is working ok and you are happy with how everything has been imported. It's very important that the data in each column follows the same correct formatting every time. Inconsistencies with your data may cause errors importing particular products.

Importing the CSV file

  1. In the main menu go to Products and then All Products and then at the top of the page click the Import button. 
  2. You will now land on the import wizard pictured below. Please select your CSV file and follow the wizard through to completion.