Product List Export/Import Issues need to be fixed! 
Author: Tom G.In last couple of days, I looked into export/import from/to Product List of the Shopping Cart.
I found number of things that need to be fixed or implemented. (I have to thank here Andy A., who helped me in my testing.)
You can manually add product’s description which contains many new lines (hitting “Enter” while editing). The new lines make description displayed on the page more readable, look nicer.
This is the “Description” added manually:
This is how it looks in the “Shopping Cart”:
And this is in an export csv file:
The export csv file for one product is supposed to have two lines: the header and product line. With the new lines in “Description” this is not the case…
The solution I suggest, is replacing every CRLF (new line) character by “\n”. And when importing record with number of “\n”s, change each of them back to CRLF.
Issue with the semicolons in the “Description”.
When imported after export – getting:
but product doesn’t show in "Shopping Cart"!
Similar situation with commas.
When exporting – getting following csv record:
The row #2 is divided into separate cells. Importing doesn’t work:
These are three things regarding certain characters in mandatory fields.
I also found issues in exporting products with different kinds of “Discounts”. But for now – I skip them…
Hello. I sent a notification about your question to the company employees, expect an answer from them here in the comments.
I agree, this should definately be looked into, there are a number of threads all relating to this issue, but not much seems to have progressed within the development side. TOM G.. Has helped me much much more with my issue and now i am successfully doing Bulk imports via csv. which for building an ecommerce website is a necessity. Thank you Tom G for all your hard work in getting me to manage to import successfully from different csv's. I currently have 1400+ products in my store, which still need fine tuning ( missing images etc) but that is because they were never there etc.
Incomedia, please listen to your users and try and make the whole import/export issue more user friendly for All..
Tom G thanks again..
And pls Incomedia, update the CSV file to add many fields absents and presents into th GUI !!! to have a COMPLETE import solution and not just the main part.
Author
Just FYI.
Andy A. added 1400 items to his using the csv file created by the Excel program I created.
In this Excel program, you add all the information for each product in separate cells, no special editing is required. See below:
You click "Check Data", then "Create CSV & Save" and the import csv file is created.
If someone is interested in this Excel file - let me know! Send and email to polish(dot)prince(at)onet(dot)eu.
Just to add to TOM G. post, This tool is Priceless BTW, it takes all the strain and lets you check all data prior to creating the csv. It even saves and closes the file. ( you will know what i am on about if you have tried importing csv's. Tom (more Tom than me) and I have tested it quite thoroughly and if it works for me, it should work for others. It is very easy to use and Good on Tom for helping me get over this huge wall that i was up against...
Hello Tom
Thank you for your insight on this.
I would like to say that I absolutely understand the suggestions you made. The fact that the software might automatically handle the conversion of \n and "Enter" new lines makes sense and would make this easier.
I cannot say the same for semicolons though. These specific characters definitely cannot be used since they are the character on which the software is relying to understand whether or not to start a new column. I'm afraid not much can be done for those. About commas instead, I didn't understand this well
The software should have no issues with commas. Just be sure when you open up Excel, to specify that semicolon is the "separating" character and not commas
If you have further information on this, please let me know that here
Thank you
Stefano
Author
Stefano,
When it comes to "semicolon", I understand you cannot use it in category, name/code or description, because it is a separator. But some description may contain that character, since it’s widely used. Why not give user a choice of the separator! I, for example, like to use “^” or “|”. I don’t think these characters someone would use in description…
Anyway, I hope developers will take my suggestions under consideration!
Thank you, Stefano!
Author
Stefano,
This is the description in the product I created:
I exported it.
This is the text editor:
looks good.
But when I click on the export csv file I'm getting:
So, you cannot click on the csv file. You have to open blank excel and from there open our file, specifying the separator.
This is what I meant...
Hello Tom
Semicolon was used by default since it is currently one of the most used characters to do so. If you check on Libreoffice for example, you can see that conventionally, only some characters are used to preserve the standard:
Adding a choice for this would only add another layer of complexity to the operation, and most systems already export with either commas or semicolon. Semicolons are just less used normally
Also, your second point makes sense. When you open a CSV file, every program will ask you what separator is used. This is the norm and thus it is fine for this to happen. As you can see, it happened for me too when I opened a handmade csv. (example above)
I hope my explanation was clear enough
Thank you
Stefano