Magento provides a very powerful facility to add bulk products and migrate products/inventories from one Magento installation to another (usually required when you change hosting) with its Export/Import feature. Instead of adding each product one by one, you can create a product data file in CSV or XML format or export an existing file from another Magento instance in cases like migration. For creating a new file, you can download the sample CSV and XML files with which you can create the product list. Once you create the CSV or XML file, just follow these steps:
- Go to Magento Dashboard >> System >> Import/Export >> Dataflow – Profiles
- Add a New Profile or Edit an existing Import Product profile
- Upload the CSV or XML file
- Run profile
Setup Profile
To create a new profile, go to Magento Dashboard >> System >> Import/Export >> Dataflow – Profiles and click on ‘Add New Profile’.
Or if you want to edit an existing profile, just click on the ‘Edit’ button on the right of the existing Import profile.
When you create a new profile, make sure you set the product and image attributes correctly. Use the following settings for a new profile.
In the ‘Data Format’ field, specify the Type as CSV or XML depending upon the format of the product data file that you are uploading. Save the profile once the values are set correctly.
Now go back and edit the newly created profile to upload the file.
Upload the product data file in CSV or XML format and click the ‘Save Profile’ button. You can see the imported data in the directory /var/export.
After setting up the profile, you just need to Run Profile and the profile will be imported.
Since you have imported the data with SKU (unique product ID), subsequent imports with the same SKU will update the product data. So you can import the information about the product and images of the product separately. But make sure the name of the actual image file and the name mentioned in the CSV file is the same.
