woohoo! this is great.

— Last edited 08:19PM, Jun 27, 2008

That’s great news Tobi.

Should make it much easier for clients with large inventories to migrate to Shopify :)

Great Feature! Thanks so much.

Is there a way I’m missing to view all products in my store so I can download them all at one time in one file, instead of one displayed page at a time?

Is there a way that I can get the download to show pounds and not grams? My store preference is for pounds since I ship from the USA. On that note, I’d love another decimal place for pounds, or to be able to input pounds and ounces. I’d like to be more precise with product weight, especially to use the UPS an USPS shipping calculation feature.

Finally, in the download, I’ve found a number of characters did not show up correctly in Excel – but look fine in Shopify. One example is • and another is the smart quotes in 34″ x 28″ – I work on a Mac so perhaps these are not being parsed. A lot of time I grab text from a vendor’s text, so I can’t vouch for the character set, but if it looks good in shopify I use it rather than re-enter.

Thanks.

WOOOOWWWW!!!!
Thank you!

ok, just tested it, & am getting some weird results: some products are uploaded in 2 or 3 copies (from Open Office), for no reason that I can detect.
Also: I don’t quite understand how to upload the product images? There’s an img src column, but in the example csv file, that contains the url which points to an image that is already uploaded. bit puzzling.

otherwise, great!

Christina: You can point the image src to any image on the internet and shopify will download it for you. I added this to the FAQ on the right hand side.

Please email me the CSV file that gets you multiple products to tobi at jadedpixel.com and i’ll have a look.

Julene: Can you please also email me your CSV? Everything should be UTF-8 but i want to make sure.

Christina: The products should retain uniqueness based on their handle, and also based on the selection you make when you upload the CSV about whether or not to overwrite existing products or create new ones. Not sure what the duplicates/triplicates might be from if it’s not one of those things.

The img src column takes any publicly accessible URL; Shopify will download the image from that URL and save it for the product. The URL can be anywhere, it doesn’t need to be in an existing shop. If it is in an existing shop, though, it means that copying the products to another shop is extremely simple.

Thanks guys for this. Long overdue.

About to try now for a site wide price discount.

We rolled out another update which now analyzes the uploaded CSV and gives a detailed error report at upload time.

This should catch most of the issues brought up in this thread (encoding, missing headers, quoting issues). If you can sneak bad CSVs by the initial checks please keep sending me those to tobi@jadedpixel.com

Ok I did the upload and now most of the product images have been deleted.
Also certain products are seeing duplicate variants.

Total disaster.

Since the assets files have been deleted I can’t restore the site. The assets in the backup CSV are now 404’s.

Tobi I sent you an email. Please help us get the site back online as we are having a 4th of July sale that started today.

It would be good to get some feedback on the recommended way to do price adjustments with bulk import/export.

I was thinking that it would be as easy as exporting the products, amending the prices in the CSV file then importing the CSV file back into Shopify. That doesn’t seem to have worked for Chad though.

Just a heads up for everyone – DO NOT download your products, make bulk edits, and then re-upload. If you do this all your images will be deleted.

The system is designed for bulk imports on an empty site, or bulk adding new products on an existing site, but is not setup for bulk edits.

Right now most of our images are offline, rendering the store unusable.

Tobi is working on a way to get the images back.

I never heard back from Shopify so the only solution was to manually re-upload the hundreds of photos. It has taken days and not everything is back online yet.

I am very disappointed with this.

Sorry to hear that chad. For reasons like this, I wait until all kinks have been worked out. You would have thought they would have tested it to do what you wanted? I am sure lots of people want to do bulk edits, and this definitely should have been tested, tested, and re-tested since it deals with entire inventories.

Are you sure you didn’t make a small error on your part? I am tempted to create a test store to try it out…

The system is designed for bulk imports on an empty site.

Something is not right… I am uploading a very simple CSV file that I have not edited. It has been downloaded from a site A, and now I am uploading it to a site B that was previously empty, no product. It’s still uploading and there are only 4 products… It’s been 25 minutes.

It is not critical for me though.

It seems almost like there is some person on the other end sitting in an office at Jaded Pixel getting the CSV file by e-mail and adding the products by hand. ;-)

Woosh…talking about letting the air out of the tire…

Hello HunkyBill :-)

I got a confirmation e-mail about an hour after the onset of the import of my 2 products.

Actually I did not have 4 products to import, just two. (Sorry about that). I was just testing the waters. For my client.

Products are not doubled for me. They were imported 3 times. So I have 6 products instead of 3.

The system needs a little more tweaking ;-)

We released bulk import and export for all shopify customers.

Maybe we should call it ‘in beta’.

If it is in an existing shop, though, it means that copying the products to another shop is extremely simple.

That’s a great feature. :-)

And that works really well, as I imported a product definition from shop A to shop B, and images are all there.

Small correction to what chad said above:

You could download all products, edit prices and re-upload the CSV and it would work. However, in the process it would rename your images ( product.png becomes product_1.png ).

The problem is if you now make more changes to the CSV and upload the same csv again. It still references the images as product.png but this does not exist anymore. In this case shopify will not know what to do and you will end up without product images.

This was the issue chad ran into and we since deployed a fix for this. It’s one of those edge cases which only really shows up in a certain work flow and that’s why it never came up during QA :(

The importer can take a while at times. Its a very complex operation in the background. We are adding more hardware to make it more snappy.

Tobi – Did bulk edits really not come up in QA? Bulk changing prices is pretty straight forward and really isn’t an edge case.

The way you described my workflow was incorrect. I didn’t download, edit, upload, re-edit, then re-upload. It was simply download, edited prices, and uploaded.

Also the file renaming in the fix described will cause us issues. We send out newsletters linking to product images, post product images on our blog, embed images in other product pages (eg “you might also like:”), and get our products featured on forums, blogs and sites. If Shopify changes the file names on edits then there will be broken image links. Can we retain the original image file names?

OK, so just to confirm…

I want to use this feature to upload Stock On Hand values. Will this screw up my images, if I don’t specify anything in the Images column?

Do I have to chose the option to “Overwrite Existing Products”?

Thanks

Chris

After the crash and burn of the last import I setup a test account to verify any future imports. Tobi said he fixed the image bug, but I am still having a few issues with the import. I emailed him yesterday and I am awaiting his reply.

Try a test account first, and good luck!

I’m running a really simple csv file into a test store with just 9 SKUs. It’s pulling images from an existing store.

It seems to work ok the first time I run it in but if I make changes to the csv file and then import it again with the “overwrite existing products” option then strange things happen. Variants are duplicated and don’t seem to be overwritten.

I’ve only changed the “product type” and “tag” fields in the csv file. I haven’t touched the “handle” or other fields.

According to the product screen I can now import another -12 products (that’s minus 12). I think the bulk upload needs a bit more testing particularly when overwriting existing products.

Here’s a screenshot showing the error…

Me too, I seem to be able to add products, either manually or through the bulk upload, beyond my free plan limit.

When I import, I end up with duplicates, as well as a negative number there as well.

— Last edited 11:33PM, Jul 17, 2008

Mmm, even if you delete all the products and load the csv file again it still screws up.

I’ve found the only way around it is…
to delete the products in Shopify, load a different csv file with dummy products, then delete the dummy products and reload the real csv file.

This is fine for a test store but I have a client with thousands of products and I’m not that confident in the bulk upload stability.