Woocommerce CSV Import is a feature offered to some of our clients with large quantities of products to be imported to Woocommerce.
For detailed information about using the Woocommerce CSV Importer, please refer to the developer’s documentation here:
This article will walk you through a basic breakdown of how to structure your products and use the importer. You should have some familiarity with WooCommerce before you proceed.
Understanding Product Types
Products are generally divided into two groups: simple and variable.
Simple products (aka Parent products) are the most straightforward type and are analogous to any standard products sold.
Variable products are subsets of simple products and let you define variations of a single product where each variation may have a different SKU, price or stock level.
Structuring Your Products
Since variable products are subsets of simple products, we will want to figure out which are the simple products. For example, the iPhone 6 is a simple product/parent product and the iPhone 6+ is ANOTHER simple product/parent product.
Once you have understood what your simple product is, we can work towards your variable product by identifying the ATTRIBUTE that make up the variable products. In the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6+ example, there are two attribute types: Color and Diskspace.
Next, identity the different ATTRIBUTE VALUES. For example, for Color, the values are Gold, Space Grey and White. For Diskspace, they are 16GB, 64GB and 128GB. Great! In this way, we can see that combining the different variations will lead us to the following combinations for the iPhone 6.
| Color | Diskspace |
|---|---|
| Black | 16GB |
| Black | 64GB |
| Black | 128GB |
| Space Grey | 16GB |
| Space Grey | 64GB |
| Space Grey | 128GB |
| White | 16GB |
| White | 64GB |
| White | 128GB |
Once you have decided on the attributes and values, we can proceed to prepare the CSV file for upload.
Downloading the Sample Product CSV
There are two separate CSV that you should prepare: Simple/Parent Product CSV and Variation CSV.
The simple/parent product CSV contains a list of all your parent products. The variation CSV contains a list of all your variation products without your parent products.
You can retrieve a copy of your sample CSV in the following tab. The tab can be found in your admin dashboard under WooCommerce > CSV Import Suite
For information on the Product CSV, please refer to the developer’s documentation at
http://docs.woothemes.com/document/product-csv-import-suite/
For the purpose of this tutorial, please download the following CSVs instead:
demo-parent-product.csv
demo-variations-product.csv