Importing Products in Bulk

As Product Manager, Milly will frequently need to create multiple products at the same time. Perhaps a new designer has launched her new collection or the boffins down in R&D have come up with a new line of gadgets.

Whatever the reason, she uses Backoffice to import products in bulk using Excel-formatted files.

The process is simple:

• Download a blank import template using the Product Cockpit.
• Edit the downloaded file with a spreadsheet program that can read and save in Excel format.
• The Excel-format file predefines two mandatory columns: Article Number and Catalog Version. Add a column for each additional product property you wish to import.
• Fill in the rows with product data.
• After saving the completed file, import it using the Product Cockpit.

The following diagram shows the export and import buttons in the Products view of the Backoffice Product Cockpit:

As shown in the screenshot below, the Excel template file allows you to specify which properties you wish to set on the products you’re importing.

Row 1

Each column corresponds to the property identified in the first row. The property names can be tagged with the following symbols:

* Mandatory

^ Unique

+ Multi-value

= Read-only

If more than one column is tagged as unique, it's the combination of all these columns that's unique. This is referred to as the business key. As you can expect, business key columns are always mandatory, but you may mark other columns as mandatory if you like. Any row that doesn’t provide a mandatory value won’t be imported.

For products, the business key is composed of the Article Number and the Catalog version. This key is most useful when using an Excel file to update a product; the Import process will use the business key to determine which product to modify.

Multivalue properties are specified as comma-separated lists.

Row 2

The second row provides the composition of the business key used to create a reference to another database item. This field is only for informational purposes and is filled in only if the property is a reference. In the screenshot below, the Image property is a reference to a media item, but the English-language description is just text.

Row 3

The third row can be used to provide default values. For instance, if you’re importing all the products to the staged version of the Apparel Product Catalog, then you leave that column blank for every product being imported and put the string apparelProductCatalog:Staged in the third row in the catalog version column.