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CCP - Shopify: Listing Products In Bulk
CCP - Shopify: Listing Products In Bulk

How to list products in bulk to Shopify using spreadsheets in Cloud Commerce Pro

Dylan West avatar
Written by Dylan West
Updated over a week ago

This guide will take you through the process of listing products from Cloud Commerce Pro to your Shopify webstore in bulk via spreadsheet.

Contents:

1. Admin Centre

From the Admin Centre in Cloud Commerce Pro, click the "Products" button.

2. Products

On the Product Ranges screen, click the "Exports" button.

3. Product Exports

First we need to generate a fresh export of your products from which to work from to ensure we have the most up to date information and nothing is going to be incorrectly overwritten.

Click the "Export Products" button to create an export of your entire inventory.

Once this has completed, your export will show at the top of the list of exported spreadsheets. Hover your mouse over the "Actions" tab to continue.

4. Actions Menu

From the pop-out Actions menu, click "Download Spreadsheet". You will be prompted to save your new spreadsheet on your device. Select an appropriate folder and rename the file to something to distinguish it.

5. Spreadsheet

Open your saved spreadsheet in your preferred software such as Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice Calc.

To be on the safe side and avoid overwriting data for other products, you can copy the products you want to push out to Shopify to a new blank spreadsheet along with your column headers.

Before continuing, you must ensure your data is robust enough and contains all the fields required. Below are some things to consider:

Navigation Categories:

Your Shopify webstore's navigation uses categories which will have been setup by whoever built your store. In order to ensure your products display in the correctly places, you must include the appropriate categories on your spreadsheet.

These categories are OPT_ShopifyCategory1, OPT_ShopifyCategory2 etc as headers on your spreadsheet along with your other "OPT" or product options.

Other Data:

Aside from your categories, you must also consider the basic information that makes a successful website listing. Ensure all products have images, prices and clean and concise titles and descriptions.

If any of your products have multiple variations within the range, make sure to add enough product options to define them and use as drop down boxes. These are entered in the same way as your categories. For example: OPT_Colour as a header and the the appropriate colours as the data.
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You can create as many OPT_ sections on your spreadsheet as you need and the order does not matter. Simply ensure they are all next to one another.

For a more in depth look at product data and the various headers used in for importing, please check our more general product import guide here.

Images:

Images are especially important when pushing products to a website. There are very few circumstances where it would be appropriate for a listing to not have an image.
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Images are added under the header VAR_IMG. This links your listing to an uploaded image. Make sure to give your images a unique name and include that along with the relevant file extension. For example you might have "whitetshirt.jgp". Instructions for uploading your images are below.

Save:

When you are happy that your data is complete, save the spreadsheet on your device.

6. Products Revisited

Now that our spreadsheet is complete, we can head back to Cloud Commerce Pro and the Product's screen.

Click the "Imports" button to continue.

7. Imports

First we need to upload the new spreadsheet so it can be used for importing. Click "Upload Spreadsheet" and navigate to where you saved it on your device.

Once uploaded it will appear in the list of "Available items already uploaded". The most recent spreadsheet will appear at the top.

Check the box under "Use" to signify you want to use this particular spreadsheet for the upload process.

8. Import Steps

If you didn't change anything on the spreadsheet or add any new information at all, you can skip ahead and run step 13 to push out to Shopify. If you did make changes, keep reading below.

With your spreadsheet selected you can start to run the import steps one by one in sequential order. Each step has it's own button to begin that part of the import process. Details of the import will show while it's running.

Once complete, any errors will be displayed, usually with product SKU's which allow you to return to your spreadsheet to correct them before attempting the import once more.

Run through steps 1 to 6a to import the bulk of your new products. You can also run steps 7 and 8 if you want to add price and stock information to the product.

Step 9 is for importing images, but that is a slightly more involved process which is detailed below.

Steps 10 and 11 can be ran if you are adding supplier and cost price information to your products.

Step 12 is strictly for importing multipacks, which are handled separately. For a guide on how to import multipacks, click here.

9. Image Import

Importing your images works a little differently to the other import steps as it requires you to first upload your images to the system. Gather the images relating to these products that you referenced on your spreadsheet under the VAR_IMG column and put them in a folder before compressing them together in a zip file.

If you are not familiar with creating zip files, check the link here.

After creating your zip file, head back to Cloud Commerce Pro's imports screen and click the "Upload Images (ZIP)" button. Navigate to where you saved your zip file of images on your device and select it. Once the upload is complete, the images folder section will show the number of images uploaded.

Now you can select your spreadsheet once more by clicking the check box next to "Use".

Scroll down the imports screen and find step 9 to run the image import step. A drop down box gives you some control over how images are handled, although this is only relevant when uploading images to update previously imported products.

Click the "Import Images" button to begin the import like in the previous steps.

10. Add To Sales Channel

At this point, you have successfully imported your products into Cloud Commerce Pro ready for being pushed out to your Shopify website.

With your spreadsheet selected, head to "Step 13" and click the "Add To Channel" button.

A small window will appear allowing you to push your new products to any of your sales channels, one at a time. Find your Shopify channel from the list and click "Use" next to it to begin pushing your products out to the channel.

Depending on the data queue at the time and the volume of products you are working with, pushing products to sales channels can take a bit of time, so remember to have patience.

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