Monday 30 November 2015

8 Essential Steps to Migrating Your Product Data to Magento

When your business was on a small scale, it is possible that you managed with the solution that was inexpensive and enthusiastically available. As your business has grown now, it has become essential to upgrade your platform. Magento is the best eCommerce platform which is trusted by the world’s major brands.

The main reason of business owners why they postponement switching to a new platform is the fear of Data Migration Process. Sometimes Data Migration from an existing platform to Magento store becomes very unwieldy and time consuming.

Here are main eight essential steps to migrating data from an existing shopping cart platform to Magento:

Step 1: Export all product data from existing store
Step 2: Make sure you are using an Excel file.
Step 3: Eradicate unwanted columns and data fields
Step 4: Be ensure all product data formatted appropriately
Step 5: Arrange fields according to the settings of Magento
Step 6: Append new fields
Step 7: Format all information accurately
Step 8: Import all data in .CSV file format by using import feature of Magento

Step 1: Export Data
Your first step is to get all product data from the existing platform. Export tool will help to set down all product data into a file. You can remove information that is not useful in your new instance.

Step 2: Excel File
Make sure the data should be in excel file. If the data export is in .xml file format, then you need to change it into in excel file.

Step 3: Eradicate unwanted data fields
Remove all the redundant columns and data fields that will not be used in your import to Magento.

Step 4: Cleaning Data
This step will help you to reduce errors and save your time.  To clean data, remove duplicate values by using Excel’s Remove Duplicate Command. Also, use Excel’s TRIM and CLEAN functions to remove extra spaces.

Step 5: Arrange Fields
You need to rearrange product information in your data import so that it can be congregate the requirements of Magento.

Step 6: Append Fields
You can add new fields to your Excel file based on your findings.

Step 7: Format Product Information
Product Data imported into Magento must be in .csv format always. If we are using an Excel file, we need to convert that file into a .csv file.

Step 8: Import Data
Upload the complete .CSV file using import feature in Magento. It will take 1-2 hours in importing 200-300 products on an average base. After completing importing product data, a manual confirmation is required to ensure that all products have successfully imported into Magento.

These steps will surely help you in migrating your product data to Magento. But if you don’t have time then you can outsource this process to Switch2eCom and manage entire cycle cost-effectively.

Thursday 26 November 2015

5 Tips for Quickly Product Upload in Magento Store

As we know in this busy schedule life, online shopping is becoming essential for every human being. As it has also lot of benefits as compare to offline shopping. There are many eCommerce platforms available in the market. Magento is one of the best eCommerce stores which people generally using for selling their products.

When there is need for adding bulk products in database it can become tedious, so that is why with the help of product data entry services provide company, you can feel relief from the stress of managing them. It can become a challenge for online stores to manage and upload bulk products manually as it is very time consuming.

If you are using Magento store platform, you can use these tips for quickly upload a large number of products:

1. Bulk Import: With the help of single CSV file, you can import a large number of products very easily. You just need to understand the formatting for bulk product upload. You can simply understand this by exporting some existing products into a CSV file.

2. Bulk Images: Images plays an important part for every product. By using FTP, you can upload bulk images only in one attempt. But need to sure that images are accurately tagged and named according to their SKU.

3. Bulk Features and Categories: Every time your motive is how make it easier for your customers to quickly find the product they are searching for. For this you need to add easily identifiable categories and clear features for the product. Make a list of all categories and attributes before bulk import so you can easily correlate products with their respective categories.

4. Capping File Size: Before bulk import, focus on size of the CSV file, so that your servers would not become overloaded. For this you can make set of files with 500 products then upload them simultaneously.

5. Updating Existing Products: When there is need to update description, features, images of existing products, you can do this by bulk import features using CSV file. You just to need import the SKU fields and the fields that need to be updated. You can see the changes in product pages after refreshing.

If you don't have time and expertise to manage product upload process for your Magento based website, then you can choose Switch2eCom as your outsourcing partner.