Uploading vs Cloning Products

[hondo69]

I've hit a dead end with my approaches to adding new products.

Drop-downs don't work well for most of these products so I can't use the <extra> tag. In these cases we'll typically build separate SKU's for each item. It is pretty easy to use the "Clone" feature and edit the attributes by hand. But the trouble with cloning is that it does not copy Images or Assets to the new cloned product. It takes forever to keep adding the same Images and Assets over and over again.

I've tried uploading new products using MS Access 2000 and Excel. Neither work.

Access gives you an "invalid argument" error. After some research, I've discovered there must be a mismatch in at least one of the column data types. For example, it might be expecting a date to be entered when the column header indicates I need to enter a price. The only other possibility is the file size would be too large, but I'm only adding 1 test product.

I tried using Excel, but when I uploaded my 1 test product I rec'd a message saying "Upload Successful, 78 records added". I'm not sure what is happening but it seems a little spooky.

Even if the upload were to work, I'd still have to go back and add Images and Assets by hand, one at a time. Surely there is a method to streamline this process.

Anyone out there know some tricks to speed up the process?

[moderator1]

You can bulk upload images via FTP. The offline upload is actually quite flexible - you don't have to specify all the columns, and it can be in the order that you want. I suggest you open a trouble ticket so we can get into your back office and investigate and guide you further.

[ronharter]

FYI when you upload via a CSV file it gives you the total in your database so if you added only 1 and it came back and said 78 then it means you had 77 in there before you uploaded the new one.

Ron
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Ron Harter