Exporting Apparel Products

The options to import and export apparel products and subproducts were added to a release of ProductCart a little while ago, and are documented in the Wiki. However, after trying to update some of our products/subproducts this week, I experienced some difficulties that raised a few questions.

1. When exporting products, whether apparel [parent] or non-apparel, the fields that identify if the product is an apparel product are not exported. These fields are able to be imported, which is required when doing a new apparel product, as outlined in this documentation: http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/apparel_add-on/importing_apparel Is there a reason this information is not exported when selecting all fields on an export request? It doesn't matter whether you do it in the regular export or the apparel export, the fields don't export. This would be EXTREMELY helpful to be sure you reimport the correct way. We recently messed up a whole product line because the importer didn't realize they were apparel products, even though he selected all fields to be exported.

2. When exporting subproducts, the parent product SKU does not export, and neither do the product options in a reimportable format. This means you manually have to enter the parent product name for each subproduct. The product options display in a field called name, but the option and attribute fields aren't populated, which means you have to manipulate the spreadsheet name field in order to accomplish a correct import. If you attempt to make a few changes and reimport the exported sheet, you don't have all the necessary fields to do the import.

It's possible the subproduct export doesn't include the parent product SKU because, ideally, the exported subproduct is already known and only it's SKU is needed to reimport (is that the logic?), but in our case, things were messed up because the parent product export didn't include the apparel codes and some of the subproducts were deleted in the ensuing mess, so we really needed the parent product SKU to be part of the import, which worked after I added those.

Am I missing something here? I've spent a good part of the last couple of days correcting this messed up import, and had to spend a fair amount of time manually updating some products or making global changes to try to correct everything. I still have some duplicate options that ended up being created, but at least the products are working and able to be ordered on our site again.

Is this something that could be corrected/enhanced in a future version, or am I doing something wrong?

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thetatech Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 05-August-2008 Status: Offline Points: 0	Post Options Post Reply Quote thetatech Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Topic: Exporting Apparel Products Posted: 30-November-2009 at 4:00pm
	Is there a method of exporting apparel products and sub-products?? I want to remove a subset of apparel products and move them to another database on another site.. I know you can import apparel products / subproducts.. Can anyone advise?

DebbieID Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Newbie Joined: 11-April-2010 Status: Offline Points: 1	Post Options Post Reply Quote DebbieID Report Post Thanks(0) Quote Reply Posted: 29-April-2010 at 9:47am
	The options to import and export apparel products and subproducts were added to a release of ProductCart a little while ago, and are documented in the Wiki. However, after trying to update some of our products/subproducts this week, I experienced some difficulties that raised a few questions. 1. When exporting products, whether apparel [parent] or non-apparel, the fields that identify if the product is an apparel product are not exported. These fields are able to be imported, which is required when doing a new apparel product, as outlined in this documentation: http://wiki.earlyimpact.com/apparel_add-on/importing_apparel Is there a reason this information is not exported when selecting all fields on an export request? It doesn't matter whether you do it in the regular export or the apparel export, the fields don't export. This would be EXTREMELY helpful to be sure you reimport the correct way. We recently messed up a whole product line because the importer didn't realize they were apparel products, even though he selected all fields to be exported. 2. When exporting subproducts, the parent product SKU does not export, and neither do the product options in a reimportable format. This means you manually have to enter the parent product name for each subproduct. The product options display in a field called name, but the option and attribute fields aren't populated, which means you have to manipulate the spreadsheet name field in order to accomplish a correct import. If you attempt to make a few changes and reimport the exported sheet, you don't have all the necessary fields to do the import. It's possible the subproduct export doesn't include the parent product SKU because, ideally, the exported subproduct is already known and only it's SKU is needed to reimport (is that the logic?), but in our case, things were messed up because the parent product export didn't include the apparel codes and some of the subproducts were deleted in the ensuing mess, so we really needed the parent product SKU to be part of the import, which worked after I added those. Am I missing something here? I've spent a good part of the last couple of days correcting this messed up import, and had to spend a fair amount of time manually updating some products or making global changes to try to correct everything. I still have some duplicate options that ended up being created, but at least the products are working and able to be ordered on our site again. Is this something that could be corrected/enhanced in a future version, or am I doing something wrong?