Importing Products best practicies?

What is the best practice for importing products via xls spreadsheets?

Should I keep everything in one big spreadsheet and keep updating/importing that, or should I have a seperate spreadsheet for maybe each category?

The reason I am asking is I have been just using the one spreadsheet that now has 380 products. But now when I try to import it keeps timming out before completing and only gets as far as 370.

Thanks...

Hi, first post and a topic that is of interest to me - did you ever get an answer?

No answers yet I'm afraid. But I am thinking if you have a big store the best way would be to have a seperate spreadsheet for each category. Maybe even for each sub-category if your store is very big...!

I do know that when I want to edit/add products, just editing the spreadsheet and reimporting works really well. The only thing is, if you use a product sku, do not modify this. If you do it will add the reimported products as new additional ones. Made that mistake :o)

Hope this helps...

Many thanks for the update, I think that I might do the bulk import locally within SQL and then upload the DB to my server.

Good luck with your upload

Good idea,

But I don't think my webhost allows me to upload to the server... :o(

BTW, who are you hosting with?

At the moment I have an old school .ASP site running on CO-LO and I'm planning to start using NOP, I'm not sure if I can get it working on CO-LO or whether I need a dedicated server....

I am using a small local Irish firm. My nopCom site works fine with them, after they tweeked the sever settings a little that is!

However it should run with most web hosters. Only thing is the trust issues. I can get my provider to run in full trust, but most don't. However nopCommerce specs say it runs in medium trust, but with reduced features. But I have seen some posts saying they can't get the thing to work in medium trust.

Maybe give the forums a search on trust issues and you could look at nopCommerce advised hosting providers.

Let me know if you would be interested in using my provider and I'll pm you their details.

I'm going to chat with my hosting company later in the week; if they can't help then I'll be interested in your local firm. I have a place in Cobh so get over to the emerald isle regularly and that would work for me.

Thanks for the info

Hello Glennlawr,

Glad to see you have a handle on bulk import of products.

For some of us who are barely beginning with NopCommerce, can you shed some light on HOW DO YOU SET UP YOUR EXCEL SPREADSHEET TO IMPORT BULK PRODUCTS. There is no discussion of how the spreadsheet should be laid out and what data goes where to make the import happen.

Any ideas you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Moe Lakhany

Moe,

All you need to do for the xls layout is to create a product in your store (if you haven't already) and export as xls from the products page. Then the saved xls can be your template to edit and add new products. Also, if you are interested in adding multilpe products and including images (nopCom does not do this as standard) have a look at this post

https://www.nopcommerce.com/boards/t/6262/ive-integrated-an-excel-bulk-file-upload-w-pictures-images-into-v18.aspx


Hope this helps,

Glenn.