Importing Products (via Excel)

There are several ways to import products into Sales Layer, one of the fastest of which is by copying content directly from an Excel spreadsheet. To do this we click on the Products option in the main menu, then on Import Products, and then Excel File from the three options.

Before we start, it’s worth mentioning that this process is useful not just for inserting new product information, but also for updating data on existing products.

Note: although the rule is that the reference of the product/category/variant is unique, and in case of importing a existent reference the system updates its values, the texts are case sensitive. Therefore, it is a different reference EXAMPLE001 and example001, so both can coexist.

The next step is to go to your spreadsheet, copy the information on your products, and paste it into Sales Layer. As you can see, it’s possible to enter data on up to 25000 products at a time. Once you have pasted in your data, the columns to be added to your catalogue are displayed so that you can review them before completing the import.

Note: You can import a maximum of 750 columns at a time from an Excel/CSV file.

At this point, let’s take a moment to review the fields that Sales Layer considers as basic and necessary for your product information, although two of these are actually required when importing data.

• Product Reference: the unique code of the SKU (the required field)
• Section Reference: used to link products with categories
• Family: more details on this in a later section
• Product Name (the required field)
• Product Description
• Product Image

Tip: if you have fields in your excel with the same name, but with suffixes of “:es” and “:en”, for example, Sales Layer will create a multi-language field, to store information in several languages. When importing, they can be identified by the green tick in the Multi-language check-box, moreover only the first of these fields has a value in the field type dropdown box.

When Sales Layer recognizes a field being imported as one of the above, or as one you have previously imported, it displays it with a green background. New fields are shown with a white background. With these you should check that the field type (short text, image, files, etc) is appropriate for the data in that field. Finally, when a field is given a red background it means that Sales Layer has discarded the field and will not import it, this often happens because the column in the Excel file is empty. However, you can always click on Enable to make Sales Layer import the field if you wish.

If the products that we are going to import have images already uploaded in Sales Layer, the option Reimport links of existing file will appear. This option will reprocess the images that are in the imported Excel/CSV as new but it will maintain the links with all the items that have been previously linked.

Note: In the event that the same reference appears several times in an Excel file, the first one will be uploaded to Sales Layer, omitting the rest.

With any of the fields you import it’s possible to change their name or field type. A major advantage of this process is that, besides helping you to configure your product table on the first import, Sales Layer will remember the configuration you have chosen for future imports.

Note: Sales Layer has been tested with 1 million products in total. This limit can vary depending on the complexity of the structure (number of fields, number of languages, etc.)

Here you can download the sample file that we use in our training sessions.