Have you ever tried to import products into your Maropost webstore and accidentally broken something? Perhaps added products you didn’t mean to or updated the wrong ones? Perhaps your CSV has been corrupted and didn’t upload as you expected.
Here are four tips to help reduce the impact on your webstore in these events.
Minimum Necessary Force.
When you’re updating products in your store, many issues can be avoided by simply omitting fields from your import that you aren’t changing. For example, if you’re updating your pricing, use a CSV containing only the SKU* and Price (A) fields. This eliminates any accidental changes to extra fields that may have occurred either by your accidental changes or by Excel reformatting your CSV. Also, remove any rows where you are not making changes to the price.
Always take an import backup.
It can be tempting to just get in and get it done when making changes to your products. But mistakes such as your SKU’s losing their leading zeros do happen and when they do, it helps to be able to roll back without having to pay Maropost for a data restore. To use the previous example, first export the SKU* and Price (A) fields, open it, save it as another file and edit it. That way, you have the original as a backup.
Set appropriate import limitations.
As you move through the import wizard, you will notice a screen that looks like the following:
It is extremely important to select only what you are looking to do. Again, to use the previous example, you don’t want to add/update, you only want to update. This way, if there are any errors in the SKU field, the system won’t create new products and most issues will be avoided. This logic can be applied to adding new products only too.
Automatically generate new categories when importing products.
A bonus trick not many know about is the ability Maropost has to generate new categories if they do not exist.
This can be really handy when adding new products in new categories and saves you from having to manually create them. Be warned though: if you make spelling errors in your category path names, this will result in new categories being created which can look a bit silly on the front end of your store.
Those are my top tips for importing products into your Maropost store!