Product and Customer CSV Import

2 | published by Aleksey Bobkov on Wednesday, March 03, 2010

We recently published the Product and Customer CSV Import features. These features allow you to import product and customer records from CSV files, previously created in another application. We have successfully tested the product import with a Magento CSV file, exported from a live Magento store. The product import feature even allows you to import product images, if you have a corresponding column in the CSV file, and a ZIP archive containing the images.

Besides the most obvious usage of importing data from other applications, the Product Import feature can make populating your product catalog a breeze - rapidly create multiple products in Excel (or compatible), save as a CSV file and import into LemonStand all within a few minutes.

The CSV Import feature is somewhat complicated, and the main issue is matching columns in the CSV file to columns in LemonStand tables. On the other hand, the feature should be simple to use, in order to make migration from other eCommerce applications to LemonStand as simple as possible. We developed a user interface which allows you to match columns by dragging them. We also used custom scroll bars, because the defaults are too heavy for the lightweight user interface. The CSV Import user interface is implemented as a behavior (a feature of the LemonStand programming framework) and can be used for other cases where we need to import data from a CSV file.

In order to simplify CSV Import tasks, we added the Load and Save Column Configuration features, which allow you to save matched columns into a file and then re-use it, or share with other LemonStand users. We prepared two configuration files for importing products and customers from Magento (use right click/Save File As menu to download files):

If you haven't already, you can update your LemonStand beta installation and these features will become available automatically. Happy importing!

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