Bulk Product Import into OpenCart

Bulk product import into OpenCart

Entering a thousand items by hand is impossible, and supplier price lists almost never match the structure of your store: names in one column, specifications mixed together, prices with a markup applied, images as links. An import solves that once and then repeats on a schedule.

What I work with

Excel and CSV in any structure, supplier XML and YML feeds, exports from accounting systems. The format does not matter — what gets agreed is the mapping of columns to store fields.

What gets transferred

• names, descriptions, prices, stock levels, SKUs;
• categories — including building a tree from text such as "Clothing / Men's / Jackets";
• specifications and attributes, so filters work;
• options: sizes and colours, with their own prices and stock;
• images by URL, downloaded and resized.

What usually goes wrong

The most common problem is not the import itself but the second one. A repeat run creates duplicates, because products are matched by name and the supplier has changed it slightly. So matching is always done on SKU or another stable identifier, never on the name.

The second classic problem is updates overwriting your edits: you rewrite a description and the nightly import restores the supplier's version. So which fields get updated and which stay untouched is agreed separately.

Scheduled updates

A one-off import can be turned into an automatic one: once a day the store collects the current price list and updates prices and stock by itself. For large catalogues the file is processed in chunks, so it does not hit memory and execution time limits.