Been reading a lot about bulk importing of products into Magento and I must say it certainly does not look easy at first. But it does get better once you have worked out a set up.

Magento Bulk Import Products

Certainly not great to do bulk import of products in Magento all manually with a csv file in Excel or Numbers. Many fields to deal with due to attributes, formats to worry about as Microsoft Excel might mess them up, errors uploading because you forgot fields and so on.  But this is an option for which you do not have to cough up $99.99 like for this extension. And it also gives you a nice backup of all your products.

Step One – Create Some Products

If you did not create any products yet do create some. This will allow you to export them as a csv file which you can basically use as a template to add new products and or append new data to existing products.

Step Two – Export Products

You will need to export the products from the Magento Dashboard by going to system > import/export > export. There you can select products as an option and csv as the export format and export all. You can also exclude certain product attributes by checking skip before an attribute. With basic attributes alone you have 40+ cells in one row and with some clients I worked with we had 140+!

If you do intend to upload simple products and have certain attributes you can skip the ones you do not need. This will at least make the Excel sheet to work with more workable.

Step Three – Edit CSV

The csv can be edited in Excel or numbers as long as you store it as a comma separated csv file windows style. A lot of developers recommend Open Office or Libre Office as Excel might mess up the format of certain cells.

Step Four – Import Magento Products

The next step will be to import all products. Again under system import/export but then import. Mind you, you might get errors due to missing fields, wrong file format, corrupted fields and so on when not done properly. So do backup all before you do this. Especially when you just want to update products using the append option.

Caveats

Here a few things to keep in mind:

• Do make sure to use a comma separated csv file and in utf8. Otherwise importing won’t work.
• Two, make sure the size of the file does not exceed the server settings. In the image above you saw we allowed 64MB there so quite a bit.
• Three, images have to be uploaded separately and paths can be added in the csv, but I would just do this after you have added the products inside Magento.

Good Reads

• Uploading Products to Magento With A Product CSV Excel File by Trellis
• Stack Overflow post on issues important Magento Data
• Commercial Magento Bulk Import Extension if you decided manual is too cumbersome