OVERVIEW
Merchants can potentially get a ton of their time back by importing their product catalog into Hotcakes using the built-in import feature and a simple Excel spreadsheet. The import function works great for the first time or to import an update to your product catalog. Product import is especially useful for things like bulk product updates, find and replace common terms, and more. Hotcakes will do the work of adding new fields and merging updates.
REQUIREMENTS
The following information is required to already be known:
- How your products will be displayed when on your site
- Product details (e.g., price, types, variants, categories, images, etc.)
- How to use Microsoft Excel compatible spreadsheet software
- Store administrator login access on your site
It would be very helpful to first add a few products in Hotcakes itself and modify your store to look how you want, and then export the products. This will give you a better understanding of how the Excel spreadsheet relates to your store and product information.
GETTING STARTED
In order to import products, it will be necessary to have a copy of the products spreadsheet so that you are editing or adding products in the expected format. If you don’t have one, either export your existing products, or download a sample spreadsheet. You can also find a copy of this spreadsheet in the Products view of the store admin area.
IMPORTING PRODUCTS
Your first step to importing products will be to edit your product spreadsheet with all updates that you want to have imported into your store.
When entering the store admin area, hover over the Products menu and choose Products or click the Add Products button on the Dashboard view.
Like most admin views, you will see a left navigation area. At the bottom of this area you will see an Import from Excel button.
You will now see the Products Import view. Use the upload option to find and select your product spreadsheet on your computer.
A successful product upload will result in a message appearing like shown below.
If you are updating the products on your site, be sure to check the “Update existing products” checkbox.
Now all you have to do is click the Start Importing button to process your product spreadsheet. The import will show you each product as it is processed and illustrate the status of the import to you. If any problems occur, it will let you know why the product could not be updated or imported.
If you need to perform the import again, simply choose your spreadsheet and import it again.
PRODUCT IMAGES
When you import products, each will likely have a primary image that you want to use in various views to illustrate what the product is and/or looks like. You can specify the name of the primary image in the product import spreadsheet.
When you import your products, Hotcakes will look for the primary product image, and then process it the same as if you were updating the single product directly, one-by-one.
Images to be imported must be placed in the following folder on the server where you have installed Hotcakes:
- ~/Portals/{0}/Hotcakes/Data/import/
You would simply replace the {0} placeholder with the Portal ID for your store
Just make sure that the name of the image file In the "Image" cell of the spreadsheet for each product matches.
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