Importing products: a problem...

[Ally007]

Hi, I am new to CC, and hit a problem when importing a list of products via a tab delimited file.

After importing, my products show up as categories, instead of products! Can you suggest why? The import file was saved from MS Excel as a tab-delimited file, and I specified Tab as the delimiter within CC dashboard when importing.

As a result, I now have over 2000 extra product categories that are wrong and unwanted. Is there any way to mass-delete them? (I now realise it was foolish to import so many items on my first attempt.)

Also, during the import, two of the fields from my tab-delimited file showed up within CC as concatenated (i.e. merged). (One of my file's columns was for the category ID numbers (copied from the product categories I had set up in CC dashboard). The adjacent column was Product Description. Both show up merged into one field, after importing. Why?

Thank you for any help

Al

[keat]

If you are familiar with PHP Myadmin, then it might be quicker to delete them in there, but I'd recommend making a backup of the table first.

[Ally007]

On 10/16/2018 at 9:53 AM, keat said:

If you are familiar with PHP Myadmin, then it might be quicker to delete them in there, but I'd recommend making a backup of the table first.

Thanks for the suggestion, Keat. I cannot say I am familiar with PHP Myadmin, so I deleted the whole CubeCart and then reinstalled it.
Now when I import my products (tab-delimited file), it say 'Import Complete' but nothing appears in my product list!

[keat]

Reinstalling CC was a tad extreme.

I've never done an import this way, but  the import file should contain an entry ID for the category you're importing in to.

When you recreated the site, did you recreate the categories in the exactly same order.

There's a good chance that your category has changed ID's since the rebuild.

 

 

Does your site have any products at the moment ?

 

If so you could try this.

In admin down the left hand column under inventory, use the export catalogue function to create a CSV file.

Using your favorite editor, clear the CSV file bar just 1 entry.

Below this single entry, add your own products, the single entry will ensure you can figure out which column corresponds to category, product code, descriptions etc etc, and that your data is in the correct fields, in the correct format.

When this is populated, delete the single entry, and try importing the CSV back using the import catalogue function.

 

If your site doesn't yet contain any products, then create a new category manually, to this add a test product manually. Follow the above steps.

[Ally007]

Thank you for the reply, Keat. To answer your question: Yes; when I re-created my categories, I did it in exactly the same order as before. 

I have just discovered that my test product list had actually imported, after all, but not correctly. The reason they didn't show up under 'products' is because they somehow ended up under 'Manufacturers' - and each record had all of its fields merged, with some quotation marks inserted here and there!

Anyway, I wanted to try your suggestion, so I deleted the badly-imported products, and then manually created a couple of products using the CC dashboard manual-entry method, and manually assigned each to the relevant category. However, I could not see how to export the 'catalogue' file. When I click on 'Export Catalogue', I expected to find an option to specify a download destination, and maybe a file name, and some way to initiate the export/download - but all I see is per the attached screen-cap below, which makes no sense to me. I'm not sure what the 'Export URL' means. Can you (or anyone else) explain it?

Many thanks,

Al