Loading Products with Excel from a diffrent store

[Guest]

Hi, I'm new here any advice would be appriciated,

 

I am planing to start a store , the person I will get my products from has a store thru fortune3 , but I want to use oscomerce, The good news is he can save his whole tree (they call it) in Excell. My question is will I beable to put the whole thing in some where in OS so I shouldnt need to add all 1000's of items with Pics again.

 

 

any help or advice would be appriciated.

 

Jack

[kwalker]

Jack,

 

The 1st thing to do is backup your database. Once you've done that, you'll be fine.

 

1. Log into your phpmyadmin, and select your store database (it may be selected by default).

2. Either document or take screen-shots of your tables... You want to know how many records are in each table.... before you do anything.

3. After you've done that, you'll need to add some products to your store.....manually from the admin area. Add a few products that have a few options to them like, "shoes".. which may have the options of size, color, material or what have you.

4. After adding products manually to the store with their options, you should refresh your myphpadmin and you'll notice the tables that have new data added to them.

5. Download/export the tables to your hd. Then open each table in Excel and examine how your data was added to the tables. It's best to open all files at one time in their own window, that way you can click through each file and understand how your data was added to the tables. There are going to be about 3-5 tables you'll have to modify, depending on your particular data.

6. After you understsnd how to add a record,,, along with the options, you can copy/paste another database table records into the already open Excel files. Then all you do then is save,,, import/re-upload to the database.

 

CAUTION: BE AWARE OF TABLES THAT ARE "AUTO-NUMBER" GERENATED.

 

Just remember to manually add a few products with a few options/choices and a few products without them.

 

You may also want to use a contrib called "EasyPopulate" that will populate a database, but I'm still having issues with it, so I won't speak much of it. A good contrib that I've been using is the "Attributes Set" contrib... it'll help you out........ And let's not forget the "Multi Products Manager"... It'll move/copy/delete your items wherever,,,, very quickly,,, in bulk too. I like that contrib alot. Just wish it allows you to modify/move/delete categories in bulk. Nevertheless... get that contrib,,,, you'll be happy you did.

 

hope that helps!

 

Kevin