Hi everyone,

We've got a hefty CSV file that we need to turn into an online store. We're familiar with Virtuemart, and I've downloaded CSV Improved, but I'm not really sure where to go from here. The CSV file has been provided by the client, and I presume has been generated from their previous store, however I'm not sure whether it fits the "criteria" for import into Virtuemart via CSV Improved. At the moment, these are the item categories (columns in the CSV file).

Code | Name | Short Description | Long Description | Wholesale Price | Brand | Category | Thumb | Image | Keywords

Does anyone have experience with this, or know of any really good tutorials about how to get the whole thing up and running? Alternatively, can anyone suggest a better solution for importing this document into a Joomla online store?

I've had a a fair bit of experience with this type of thing (though not so much in VirtueMart).

I'd be pleased to help. Are you coming tonght? We could talk about it then.

Pete Nurse

From your comments it would appear you may not have the column titles correct. They must marry up to the correct fields in both the CSV and Virtue mart or they will not import. The import process is quite simple and this forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=470&...;sd=a&view=print may help you.

We are at the MJUG meeting tonight as Pete suggests and any of us are willing to help.

Regards

Shane

[MOD] Moved topic to Help and Troubleshooting forum.


CSV Improved does the manipulation part nicely. Have recently done two shops where product ranges were the same (different branding on each) so CSV Improved allowed it all to be exported then imported into the second shop without trouble. [Side note: very annoying that you have to go buy CSV Improved to do what should be (and used to be) a standard feature in Virtuemart]

Trick to having it streamline is to have the CSV set up and populated correctly. I'd start by creating a few products by the normal method, then export them out to check what the CSV file is doing, and then you know what the data format should be for the remaining data. From there, map the existing columns you have to the CSV Improved VM file, and then you can import it back in to populate VM. There's more fields in the import than you have listed above, but in most cases, items such as weight, dimensions, images, may just need to be left as blank or 0, or a default value, in order to get any specific values populated.

Also, have your product categories tree all set up in VM so that when you populate the CSV you have the right category names all set to match up. If you have products in multiple categories, assign the test products to multiple categories to check what the CSV formatting of these ends up being (don't know whether it does this part well - didn't have to try it on the initial populating via CSV)

Finally, if you've got your old products in an existing spreadsheet, I would simply create the new worksheet for the CSV import in that spreadsheet, then use VLOOKUP formula to look up the corresponding data values - you can then quickly fill down the worksheet with corrected formulas and export the final version as CSV for importing in CSV Improved.

When I next need to do this, I'll be spending the extra time documenting the process, as I think it's one of those aspects of setting up a VM store that can make the entire process more streamlined, especially where there's an existing product range.

Much thanks to Pete, Shane and Patrick for their help on this. Very much appreciated. Sorry we couldn't make it last week too. Ant and I are both flat out at the moment!

Cheers,

Chris