How to Import Products into Magento

There’s a little confusion among some on how to import products into a Magento ecommerce store
.
I spent some time today researching and trying to find the best method
on doing this. The reason for my research is because there was no
simple documentation anywhere that I could find on how to import
products. Magento actually has built a pretty robust import/export
mechanism into the ecommerce cms that has a ton of flexibility to do
many things. I’m not going to cover all of those. This is just for
those of you who simply just want to import products into their Magento
cart.

Step 1 - Add a new product manually

add a new product manually to the catalog, assign it to a category, and
fill out all fields that will be necessary to your store. The obvious
ones are price, description, quantity etc. It’s important that you fill
out all fields that you know you are going to need for all the products
you import.

Step 2 - Export Your Products

Now we want to export your product to a .csv file so that we can view
the fields that are required to import. Go to System >>
Import/Export >> Profiles. Now click on Export All Products then
Run Profile. Click on the “Run Profile in Popup” button. Once the
export is completed, go to your var/export directory on your Magento
install and you will find the .csv file there for you to download.

Step 3 - Analyze The .CSV File

Now if you look at your .csv export file you will see the field names
that you need to match up. Now just start filling yours in and creating
your csv file ready for import. This step is extremely important.
Otherwise Magento cannot match what you are trying to import and the
importing will fail. At a most basic level, here are the fields that I
imported:

store

attribute_set

type

sku

category_ids

status

visibility

tax_class_id

weight

price

name

description

Step 4 - Import Your New .CSV File

Now go to System >> Import/Export >> Profiles. Now click on
Import All Products. Change “Type” under Data Format to CSV/Tab
Seperated. Now click on Upload File, and browse for your .csv file and
click “Save and Continue Editing”. Now go to “Run Profile” and select
your file from the dropdown menu. Click the button underneath to run
the import. And whalllah. All your products should now be imported.

That was the easiest most simple approach that I could find for
Importing Products into a Magento Open Source Ecommerce Store. Like I
said I tried this myself and it worked well for me. After that, I went
in and manually updated all of my Images and

Quantity numbers. You could even import those if you want to. But for

my purpose I didn’t need to.

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