There’s a little confusion among some on how to import products into a Magento ecommerce store. I spent some time today researching and trying to find the best method on doing this. The reason for my research is because there was no simple documentation anywhere that I could find on how to import products. Magento actually has built a pretty robust import/export mechanism into the ecommerce cms that has a ton of flexibility to do many things. I’m not going to cover all of those. This is just for those of you who simply just want to import products into their Magento cart.
Step 1 – Add a new product manually
add a new product manually to the catalog, assign it to a category, and fill out all fields that will be necessary to your store. The obvious ones are price, description, quantity etc. It’s important that you fill out all fields that you know you are going to need for all the products you import.
Step 2 – Export Your Products
Now we want to export your product to a .csv file so that we can view the fields that are required to import. Go to System >> Import/Export >> Profiles. Now click on Export All Products then Run Profile. Click on the “Run Profile in Popup” button. Once the export is completed, go to your var/export directory on your Magento install and you will find the .csv file there for you to download.
Step 3 – Analyze The .CSV File
Now if you look at your .csv export file you will see the field names that you need to match up. Now just start filling yours in and creating your csv file ready for import. This step is extremely important. Otherwise Magento cannot match what you are trying to import and the importing will fail. At a most basic level, here are the fields that I imported:
- store
- attribute_set
- type
- sku
- category_ids
- status
- visibility
- tax_class_id
- weight
- price
- name
- description
Step 4 – Import Your New .CSV File
Now go to System >> Import/Export >> Profiles. Now click on Import All Products. Change “Type” under Data Format to CSV/Tab Seperated. Now click on Upload File, and browse for your .csv file and click “Save and Continue Editing”. Now go to “Run Profile” and select your file from the dropdown menu. Click the button underneath to run the import. And whalllah. All your products should now be imported.
That was the easiest most simple approach that I could find for Importing Products into a Magento Open Source Ecommerce Store. Like I said I tried this myself and it worked well for me. After that, I went in and manually updated all of my Images and
Quantity numbers. You could even import those if you want to. But for
my purpose I didn’t need to.
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You have a VERY usefull blog. Thanks for doing what you do! I’m excited to see what other things you come up with!
QUESTION: I guess you didn’t have any problems with the IMPORT?
When I went into the steps, had no problems or errors on export and import, however, the products I added to the CSV file didn’t show up on Magento’s front-end.
To fix this, I went into each of these new products from within the admin interface and uncheck, then recheck marked the category that I placed the product into. I looked at my orginal CSV export, and I know that I chose the correct Category ID number for the products I added on the CSV, so what could be the issue!!??
After everything was “manually” fixed, I even exported (to a different file name) so that I could check my work against the new export, and the two files were identical. What could be the problem!? If after typing out items in a CSV, then having touch each item in the admin panel, whats the benefit!
Thank you in advance for any suggestions you may have! (yes, running version 1.0). Derek.
I actually had this problem on my first attempt as well. What I found is that the products do no show because there is no “Quantity” in the inventory. So the second time around I had to make sure I included that column in my CSV and have at least “1″ in each cell for each product.
Chase, Thanks for the quick reply. I’ll recheck out my CSV file and make sure to look at the inventory value. I guess I’ll just bring in ALL atribute fields in from my export, do my work and import back and see if it works.
Thanks for the quick insight! And again, thanks for doing this blog.
Derek
Okay… I hope this will help anyone with the same problem importing items with Magento. As you said Chase, your items wouldn’t show up in the Front End because of the Inventory Quantity attribute in the CSV file. Well mine turned out to have a good value in all of the products I created. So I was back to the drawing board in my situation.
Here is how I got my items to show up. (Remember, they ARE showing up after import in the Admin Panel, just not in the Store)
What I needed to do is go into the EXPORT ALL PRODUCTS PROFILE and change the Store dropdown from “Default (admin) values” to “Default Store View” and Main Website. Esentially, the name of your store. I left mine default.
Save the profile, and run it (the export).
Now when opening your new exported CSV file, the vaules in the header “STORE” say “default” instead of “admin”
I copied lines and created new products out of those and imported the file back in with no problems. All products showed up at the Front End! Yeah!
To sum this up….. I too think Magento has great potential. However, this isn’t the first time that Magento has asked that I be psychic, in just “knowing” that’s the way things have to be set. They have a Forum, Wiki, Blog, Documentation, and Screencasts (which is nice), but none of these items are solid quite yet.
My hopes are that some day they will be. Right now there is just too many of these strange, yet small quirky things as to be a totally ready out of the box product. Though I’m complaining, we have to understand this is version 1.xxxx and they have done tons of work that most first release softwares don’t come close too, so I can’t wait until Magento irons things out.
SIDE NOTE: Here is an excellent link on some one else’s blog on how to upgrade Magento. (Varian’s documentation is again, there but lacking details):
http://www.nublue.co.uk/blog/using-magento-connect/
Have a good one! Derek
Thanks for sharing your method there Derek – very helpful!
Thanks!
I just wanted to comment that I had the same issue and appreciate that you guys took the time to explain how to import and how to get the products to show in the front end.
Derek I’m a little late on this. But I read through your solution and it was very helpful. Thank you very much for the link on upgrading Magento. I have been wondering lately how exactly I was going to accomplish an upgrade
hello every one
i try all steps but not import and export csv file so requested sir please guide proper i have work on these topics 2 week ago so please get a proper channel. really i am lot of frustrate . plz get a proper answer.
thanks
shubhnath yadav
Hey Im new to magento. I was able to upload my csv file and got the images up and everything but like the above posts the items wouldn’t show up in the front end but it wasn’t because of quantity. I had to go in and choose a product category for each one. Is there a way to make it do that in a batch? I thought I set it right in my csv but maybe not…any help would be appreciated.
Great idea! The OSCommerce import module did not grab everything I need and this really helped out! Thanks!
Any idea’s on a quick way of finding out the cagegory id’s (of existing cat’s) – I cant seem to see them?
Thanks for the excellent guide-to-importing-into-magento-ecommerce
ck
ck..if you already have categories setup when you do your text “export”, you should see the category ID’s that you are looking for.
thanks for that, fiqured it out in the end..
to be honest the import never worked for me, it either imported ’some’ of the products, just hung with no error message, and now has crashed the mysql server!
that was with v1.16 so perhas there is any issue with the import functionality.
thanks for your help with magento-ecommerce-import though.
Hello, the only thing that doesn’t seem to work for me and maybe this is due to my inline thinking are the Category ID’s. I have a store very similar to tigerdirect.com to build but my client only wants to start with INk Jet Cartridges… so the category ID’s don’t really work.. especially not when there are over 20,000 products and 1,000 categories…
We used to use osCommerce and we had successfully used a contribution for importing product to mysql that had a seperate column for Categories… and if the category didn’t exist it would create it. We want to do the same with Magento ie, category | shop_price | shop_by type | shop_by_etc… where these values will be entered ina layered navigation (which we know how to do).
Any ideas on how we can do this or anyone available for hire?
What about Images ?
From media/import ?
Thanks a lot for this help! Just wanted to mention the final piece of the puzzle (for me) was that after preparing the CSV file, I had to save it, close it, open it up in Notepad, and “Save As” with the option “UTF-8″. This has something to do with End-of-line being different in Linux (where I’m running Magento) and Windows (where I was doing my editing of the CSV spreadsheet). I also had to limit my spreadsheets to 100-200 products, and upload in several goes, otherwise I would sometimes (well, it happened once) get an error for 30 seconds passing during execution of some step. Might have been possible to get around that, but I just decided to break my spreadsheets up into smaller chunks.
I had images in media/import, prior to the whole process (just used Putty SFTP to move my whole oscommerce image directory there), and had to put a leading ‘/’ in the image names, for some reason.
Just to let everyone know, this is an incomplete process, but one that is often referred to on the Magento forums as well. If you have products that are configurable or grouped, or use attribute sets, or are in categories that do not exist yet, then the import will fail. Do not be fooled into thinking this is a simple process. If you have a very limited number of products and categories, and are willing to do the work, then you can maintain a great store. However, if you have more than 50+ products, you will need to pay someone to script a scheduled import, and run it as a CRON job.
Hi How are you today? I have a questions…… Whenever I upload an image to my admin and in the correct site: THE ERROR MESSAGE that show —— UNALBLE TO LIST CURRENT DIRECTORY…
help is much appreciated
thank you marco
I am going to have about 15,000 products on my site with about 3000 grouped products…am I not going to be able to use the csv method that has been previously talked about? Thanks in advance for any help that can be given…
@Carl
No, you will not be able to use the CSV method discussed. You will need to build a custom import script. Have a look at the forums regarding the import, as well as performance considerations. With 15,000 products and 3000 grouped products you will need not only a dedicated server, but likely a dedicated database as well.
Thank you everyone for the great thread of information. I am new to Magento. I am really having troubles uploading images. Could anyone help me? What is the step by step process to upload images? Could you lay it out for me step by step? Please call my cell phone if you think you could spare 10 minutes and help me. USA 435-327-1020
Thanks
Mark
I would like to know how to import downloadable products into the system. When I did the export of my sample products, there was no column for specifying the link to the download file.
In the DB the table where this info is stored is called “downloadable_Link†and the column is “link_fileâ€Â.
So now, if I want to upload all my downloadable files at once, and import these products, how do I go about doing this? Please let me know if you could help on this.
Hi !
I found your blog with interest as we are currently trying to switch from Jommla + Virtuemart to Magento + a blog.
Actually I tried to import some products following your explanations but even if everything seemed to be fine, I have always the same error: “Ligne ignorée, le champ obligatoire “sku” n’est pas défini” witch means, in shakespeare
: Row ignored, the required field SKU is not defined.
I do not understand because I have a column (before saving the files in .CSV) with the title SKU. Do you have an idea why I have such a message?
Waiting for your answer,
Nicolas
After a couple of more tries, everything seems to be working ! FOrget my former message please and thanks a lot for this article
Nicoals what did you do as i am havign the same problem
Row ignored, the required field SKU is not defined.
thanks in advance
Your instructions might have saved me from committing ritual hari kari… as opposed to just regular ol’ hari kari.
Thank you!
Hi,
My problem is different.
If I add products, then after clicking on save button I redirect to main admin page
and I don’t find any product in product list.
Please help me that where I am wrong.
Thanks in advance.
Piya
Very simple and helpful, cheers! But I have now tried to create the following profiles “Export all Categories” and Import all Categories” as I have a massive list of categories to use also. I need to be able to import and export the categories from the demo site to the live site etc. When trying to create a new profile the only options under “Entity type:” are products and customers no categories
( How can I do the above but for categories not products? Help! Thanks in advance Mark
Hi all,
I am having the same problem. Mine isn’t working at all i’ve been trying to fix it for 4 days now.
I can’t take it anymore.
I’ve mapped this thing out competely. Now i am willing to offer a little incentive to anyone that can help me fight this monster…
I have 12k products but i can’t upload any, i can’t even Export any i’ve created 150 products manually and i don’t think i’ll be able to continue on. I keep on getting Sku not defined or path not valid…
Help me please
Thank you for this post. Magento is fantastic but it sometimes a little unintuitive – something like importing products I would have though would have been built in as intitively as possible – afterall surely they want as many ecommerce sites to migrate as easily as possible.
Many thanks for your hard work in working out how to do this. I’m now off to import 400 products that I would have otherwise had to do manually.
hello all,
has anyone worked importing products which has price breakup involved?
Example: I’ve a product xyz and the price of this differs based on the quantity
1 qty: $10
10 qty: $80
100 qty: $750
and so on..
please let me know if anybody has any workaround / suggestion for the above.
regards
hassan ali
I have a suggestion to import configurable & grouped products by automatized script:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/35865/P60/
Please test it and let me know about bugs, tips, etc!
Great post. Here’s a helpful related post on importing categories too, since that’s not included out of the box:
http://ecommlab.com/14/how-to-import-categories-into-magento/
Hi.the products which are not showing in frontend.Can anybody tell me how to create products from backend?
Hi Mark, your former post mentioned importing products with images….Have you managed to do so?
I’m having the same trouble. Everything else is fine but the photos do not show…
Does anyone know how to solve that, please?
Thank you
That really worked well for me and allowed me to import my simple products fine but it seems to be lacking when it comes to importing bundled items.
There doesn’t seem to be any correlation between the main product and the item to bundle with it in the CSV file.
Does anyone know how to import bundled products?
Many Thanks.
Chris
Does anyone implemented product images? I tried with media/import and giving /info.jpeg. But its not working. any guesses?
Hi Mark,
I’m working for a client who has Magento set up and the majority of their products loaded. We need to update some of the product information, but I can’t seem to get Magento to do updates… It’s almost like it’s just not doing anything because the product already exists. No error messages though. We’re just trying to add the metadata for each product, but I don’t want to do it manually because of the volume of products and the (slow) speed of the back end interface.
Have you had any experience working with this?
Hi All,
There is this one solution by Magdeveloper.com:
It also support importing product images:
Save hours of time to get your data into Magento.
Assign products to categories
Rewrite product data to any preferred Magento Data scheme.
This product is not limited to any Magento webshop version.
No additional scripts or macros are needed.
Ultra fast conversion, tons of product data is converted in just a second! Suitable for 10.000 product importing (scheduled at night)
Easy to use interface and organised product data.
Features:
* Imports any .csv (or even .txt files) from your whole seller into Magento.
* Performs Ultra Fast offline conversion to Valid MS XML
* Converts tons of products within seconds. Virtually no limit to the data to be converted.
* All CSVs will be converted to a valid MS XML Excel scheme and can be directly imported into Magento.
* Rewrites categories strings to category id’s
* Supports Imports Images from the CSV
More info about the importer:
http://www.magdeveloper.com
Check it out!
How import product with images? Im put images to media/import but no one image not added
Question: what if the product image is hosted to a certain link: http://yoursite/com/images/1231.jpg
any idea? thanks
I found this approached worked well with simple products but when creating a website which consisted mainly of bundled products with multiple images I still had to do most of the work manually.
I could get the basic product information in via the CSV but I had to add images to each product manually (with the exception of the preview ones) so that I could get several images per product.
I also couldn’t get any of the bundle attributes imported automatically so I had to manually set these up per product afterwards.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/1894
my module does import bundle products w/ tier pricing also if needed
You have missed required field short_description in your import list
Anybody tried making a magento extension that consumes a web services and populates the db with products and categories?
Thanks for the helpful post and comments. I also have a question (I’m running 1.3.2.3)
Was able to get the new products to import with images (thanks for the /media/import solution)…
Is there a way to export a legend for the category id’s?
Thanks!
Thanks for your clear statements concerning importing products in to Magento shop!
any have a data examples for magento?
I would also like to thank you for the time you invested creating this article.
Thank you
Very helpful, thanks!
We’ve been with Yahoo Store for a long time and have a lot of inner pages well indexed in Google. Is there an easy way to import our products into Magento and retain our URLs to preserve our rankings?
Hello Guys,
This is a great post.
We have also developed an extension that uploads up to 10,000 products to magento from your Doba account in seconds.
If you would like to try our stable release please go 123gosell.com.
I would love to know your responses.
If you use Microsoft office especially on mac excel will produce a CSV format that will not upload correctly. Use Open office to get a really well formatted CSV file.