Mass Product Importer for WP e-Commerce comes of age!
After a month of public testing, comments, feedback and feature requests, my mass product importer for WP e-Commerce is a stable solution for store owners to quickly and easily import categories/brands and products into WP e-Commerce.
It’s available now for download from the Shop.
Today I finished the internal theme files for the importer removing any dependence on the store’s WordPress themes to display the importer correctly. Included below are some screenshots to review:
Mass Product Importer for WP e-Commerce is an instant electronic download and comes with comprehensive instructions and access to a dedicated forum allowing users to ask questions and provide feature requests.
Update: I have released a premium edition of Mass Product Importer for WP e-Commerce that includes bulk image upload and dynamic thumbnail generation for WP e-Commerce; meet Product Importer Deluxe for WP e-Commerce!
Great timing on this release – I think I need this ASAP!
One question – can I upload prices for different variations, i.e. the same product but a different price for “red” instead of “blue?” I ask because the existing pricing system is uber-time consuming if you have to price a lot of variations manually.
Hey Jason, getting variation support stable is my next priority after birthday celebrations today, I’m 22!
It may be included in a separate product as the complexity is extensive, subscribe for updates and I’ll post an update soon.
Fair enough…I’ll keep my eyes open for you update. Thanks for responding.
Does the plugin support image uploads yet? form the above images it appear not to!
Hey PrimalOdyssey,
I was just talking to John about that on e-mail, right now I’m setting up a WP E-Commerce shop and am uploading image thumbnails for each of my 250-500 products. See it at http://longse.visser.com.au.
Image upload support is coming before variation support… this is driving me crazy, and crazy gets development priority tomorrow.
For those who have purchased the bulk import module please leave feedback on the Instinct blog to let others know how you went, big thanks goes out to all of you for your support!
http://getshopped.org/plugins/visserproduct-importer/
Michael. What’s the time frame for getting image support back in and adding multiple category support? Thanks, Dan
Hey Dan, as soon as possible. I have a client site to wrap up this weekend so end of next week with a working prototype. Any ideas on best format for product variations within a CSV file?
Michael, I don’t know how e-Commerce keeps track of multiple variations when you add them manually, so I can’t answer your question. Perhaps you could do some sort of query using phpMyAdmin with a working database that has multiple categories?
I know that for the Yahoo! shopping cart system the syntax was (for, say, categories: sealife, zoo, and southwest)
sealife zoo “southwest”
Dan
I’ve got image upload/thumbnail creation support working on my bulk product management system; previewed at: http://www.visser.com.au/blog/bulk-product-manager-for-wp-e-commerce/
I’m now transferring this across to the Mass Product Importer, what I’m thinking of doing is having a checkbox with “Upload images” that allows you to preview all products about to be imported and allows you to match an image upload against each product.
This method could very easily lead to large forms being submitted but would be a single strike solution to import product images into WP E-Commerce.
The alternative is just match to an Image column in the CSV and leave it up to the store owner to upload the product images and product thumbnails into the correct server directories.
Thoughts? I’m leaning on the first option as it’s a challenge, keeps the store owners out of FTP land and automatically generates product thumbnail images for WP E-Commerce.
MV, option 1 sounds like a winner, do you have a demo site that users can pre-view this in action? might be a good option to get the sale over the line.
Hey PrimalOdyssey, I couldn’t decide so I’m doing both. CSV column upload and option for manual image upload.
Here’s how I’ve laid out the elements:
http://www.visser.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/screenshot-6.jpg
Great point on demo site, I’ll create some test sites of both the Product Importer Standard and other editions.
What a day! I’m rapt to have bulk image upload support completed in Mass Product Importer Deluxe for WP E-Commerce. Product variation support for bulk upload into WP E-Commerce is next on the horizon…
http://www.visser.com.au/blog/product-importer-deluxe-for-wp-e-commerce-released/
I’ve put together a full Addon page for Product Importer Standard.
http://www.visser.com.au/wp-ecommerce/addons/product-importer-standard/
Good Job, for the great internal theme files made. I’m sure this would fast track any site development.
After several requests I’ve added a demo for interested customers.
http://mpiswpe.demo.visser.com.au/import/products/
A demo of the Deluxe release with support for mass importing images and generating thumbnails is here.
http://mpidwpe.demo.visser.com.au/import/products/
Can this be used on multiple sites from a single purchase? As you are importing to the “Additional Description” field, does it import well with html tags and line breaks?
Hi PrimalOdyssey, as my importer brings across all data from the column assigned for Additional Description HTML tags and line breaks are included. You will need to adjust the filter within WP e-Commerce that controls what HTML elements are allowed to be displayed to site visitors.
Great work! Quick question here. I couldn’t figure out how to define sub-categories through the category importer. What’s the proper format?