How does importing supplier products work?
Our import feature allows you to bulk add or update a suppliers products by uploading a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that contains a single sheet of product data structured into specific columns.
How do I bulk add supplier products?
Go to Commerce > Purchase orders > Suppliers.
Find the relevant supplier and click View in the Options column.
Click the Products tab under the supplier title.
Click the Import button in the top right.
Tick Adding new products under Which type of import you are doing?
A help box will appear telling you how to structure your spreadsheet columns correctly, see How do I structure my spreadsheet columns?
Once you've structured your spreadsheet columns, add the product data, see What data do I provide when adding or updating products?
Once you've added your data, click the Choose File button to open a File Explorer window and select the spreadsheet from your computer.
Click the Import button.
If there have been any issues with your data, an error message will be displayed with the row number and issue. Make the relevant changes to your spreadsheet then repeat the process above from step 6.
How do I bulk update supplier products?
Go to Commerce > Purchase orders > Suppliers.
Find the relevant supplier and click View in the Options column.
Click the Products tab under the supplier title.
Click the Import button in the top right.
Tick Updating existing products under Which type of import you are doing?
A help box will appear telling you how to structure your spreadsheet columns correctly, see How do I structure my spreadsheet columns?
Once you've structured your spreadsheet columns, add the product data, see What data do I provide when adding or updating products?
Once you've added your data, click the Choose File button to open a File Explorer window and select the spreadsheet from your computer.
Click the Import button.
If there have been any issues with your data, an error message will be displayed with the row number and issue. Make the relevant changes to your spreadsheet and then repeat the process above from step 6.
How do I structure my spreadsheet columns?
Your spreadsheet must be of the .xlsx file type and only contain one sheet, any additional sheets will be ignored.
The first row of the spreadsheet must list the column headings in separate columns, see What are the columns for adding or updating supplier products? for the supported headings. All column headings should be in uppercase.
An easy option for structuring a spreadsheet is to first export supplier products, this will download a spreadsheet of the correct file type (.xlsx) that already has most of the columns that are used for adding or updating. You can then use the downloaded spreadsheet as a template.
You can add additional columns to the spreadsheet by adding a new column and entering a supported column heading into the first row of the new column. If you wish to remove any columns, simply delete them from the spreadsheet.
What are the columns for adding or updating supplier products?
When adding or updating suppliers, the PRODUCT_ID, and VARIANT_ID columns are required, all other columns are optional. The supported columns are as follows:
PRODUCT_ID
VARIANT_ID
DEFAULT
SUPPLIER_SKU
SUPPLIER_BARCODE
SUPPLIER_COST_PRICE
UPDATE_COST_PRICE
What data do I provide when adding or updating supplier products?
When adding supplier products using the import feature, it is important that data you provide meets certain guidelines to avoid any issues. The guidelines are as follows:
Each row of your spreadsheet is read as a single product.
PRODUCT_ID - must be provided and must reference an existing product (you can get these by doing a product export).
VARIANT_ID - must be provided and must reference an existing product variant (you can get these by doing a product export).
DEFAULT - must be either yes or no.
SUPPLIER_SKU - cannot exceed 50 characters.
SUPPLIER_BARCODE - cannot exceed 20 characters.
SUPPLIER_COST_PRICE - must be a number greater than zero.
UPDATE_COST_PRICE - must be either yes or no.
Troubleshooting
Despite our best efforts, there are still things that can go wrong while importing supplier products, here are some issues that have previously been encountered:
Some numeric values are incorrect and contain an 'E+' - This is a behaviour of Microsoft Excel, when you enter a value above a certain length into a cell that is using the number data format, Excel automatically converts that number into a scientific notation with a decimal place after the first digit and an 'E+' near the end. To fix the problem do the following:
Open the spreadsheet in Excel and open the Data tab at the top of the page
2. Select the entire column that you are having an issue with by clicking the letter above the column heading (the whole column should be highlighted) then click the Text to Columns button.
3. This will open the Text to Columns wizard, click the Next button to skip through steps one and two. On the third step, select the Text checkbox and click the Finish button.
4. You should then see a small green triangle in all of the cells in the selected column indicating that they are now set to the text data format and can be imported correctly.