How to import products into Magento?

There’s a little confusion among some on how to importproducts into a Magento ecommerce store. I spent some timetoday researching and trying to find the best method on doing this.The reason for my research is because there was no simpledocumentation anywhere that I could find on how to import products.Magento actually has built a pretty robust import/export mechanisminto the ecommerce cms that has a ton of flexibility to do manythings. I’m not going to cover all of those. This is just for thoseof you who simply just want to import products into their Magentocart.

Step 1 – Add a new product manually
add a new product manually to the catalog, assign it to a category,and fill out all fields that will be necessary to your store. Theobvious ones are price, description, quantity etc. It’s importantthat you fill out all fields that you know you are going to needfor all the products you import.

Step 2 – Export Your Products
Now we want to export your product to a .csv file so that we canview the fields that are required to import. Go to System>> Import/Export>> Profiles. Now click on Export AllProducts then Run Profile. Click on the “Run Profile in Popup”button. Once the export is completed, go to your var/exportdirectory on your Magento install and you will find the .csv filethere for you to download.

Step 3 – Analyze The .CSV File
Now if you look at your .csv export file you will see the fieldnames that you need to match up. Now just start filling yours inand creating your csv file ready for import. This step is extremelyimportant. Otherwise Magento cannot match what you are trying toimport and the importing will fail. At a most basic level, here arethe fields that I imported:

• store
• attribute_set
• type
• sku
• category_ids
• status
• visibility
• tax_class_id
• weight
• price
• name
• description

Step 4 – Import Your New .CSV File
Now go to System >> Import/Export>> Profiles. Now click on Import AllProducts. Change “Type” under Data Format to CSV/Tab Seperated. Nowclick on Upload File, and browse for your .csv file and click “Saveand Continue Editing”. Now go to “Run Profile” and select your filefrom the dropdown menu. Click the button underneath to run theimport. And whalllah. All your products should now be imported.

That was the easiest most simple approach that I could find forImporting Products into a Magento Open Source Ecommerce Store. LikeI said I tried this myself and it worked well for me. After that, Iwent in and manually updated all of my Images and
Quantity numbers. You could even import those if you want to. Butfor
my purpose I didn’t need to.