Ever since I first installed and configured WP E-commerce I’ve really liked the usability that it offers its users. This plugin uses CSV (Comma Separated Value) files to help you import product related information in a way that makes it quicker and easier to create ecommerce website product catalogues. I wanted to show you just how easy it is to import product information when you use this plugin for managing your ecommerce website so let’s have a look at how you can do this.
Step 1: Create a CSV file with columns for the following fields…
Description, Additional Description, Product Name, Price, SKU, weight, weight unit, stock quantity, is limited quantity
Free Download: Please feel free to download and use the CSV file I created here and use it on your next import into WP E-commerce
Step 2: After you’ve added the product information that you want to bring into your WP E-commerce based store go to the “Settings” section on the left side navigation, select the “Store” link (which is the link to your WP E-commerce store and click on the “Import” option which will show a browse button that you can use to find the CSV file for importing.
Step 3: The next thing you will need to do is to select if you want the products that are created during the import to be marked as “Publish” or “Draft”. As a best practice, mark these products as “Draft” so that you can review them first before publishing them live to your ecommerce website. See the screenshot below as a reference as to the field I am talking about
Step 4: The next thing you will need to do is map the fields similar to the way that you see below…
Step 5: Click the import button and select the category you want the products to appear in. Now if you’ve got a number of products in different categories you may want to do an import for the products in each category to get around the fact that you can only select one category per CSV import
Step 6: Go to your products and you will see these products you’ve created in there with the status as “Draft”.
The import option for WP E-commerce is very useful but some of the limitations regarding performing imports and the fact that you cannot include product pictures in the CSV file import may put you off of using this functionality offered by the WP E-commerce plugin but if you can get around this you can save yourself a lot of time and effort when it comes to adding products to your ecommerce website.
About Luc Arnold
Thanks for the article. Good stuff. Was wondering if you have heard of anybody being able to get around that whole product image thing. I’ve got 700+ products to import for a client, and arg! What a tricky lil thing. Hoping to get out of paying the 100 bucks for another plugin that may be able to perform the thing.. but eh. We will see.
Hey Molly,
The only way that you might be able to get around it would involve a mass upload of product images, exporting the mySQL DB, updating the DB with the paths to those images and importing the newly updated DB. Just off the top of my head you might be able to do this as a workaround. Its more “labor-intensive” but could work for what you need to do. Talk soon Molly,
Luc
I have Gold Card and the most up to date version of WP ECommerce and I am attempting to bulk upload some products. I assign the QTY to each and after I upload I look at the Stock and its all N/A.
I saw on your image above you have Column 9 which make the product limited so the stock value sticks. Is that a custom plugin or how do I add that?
Hello Kevin,
Thanks for writing about this. Sounds like a pretty good project you are involved in. It should be standard actually. Perhaps have a look at the settings for the WP E-commerce plugin as it might be one of those settings that makes this column work. I hope that helps Kevin,
Luc
Hi Luc
I followed the steps on your guide, even used your spreadsheet – but the import won’t work for me. Once I press Import there’s a few seconds’ pause then a message comes up saying Setting Saved but nothing else.
Do you have any idea what’s happening?
Thx
Dave