Importing Products Into Magento with Magmi
In these guides we look into the options we have for Importing & Exporting from Magento.
We’ll take you through the Magento Dataflow tools which are the inbuilt tools that come out of the box with Magento. We’ll also learn why Matt doesn’t think they’re up to scratch for you and instead we’ll be focusing on a tool called Magmi.
Magmi is like the “Swiss Army Knife” for Magento when it comes to importing products into Magento. You can do some really cleaver things with Magmi, but first we need to learn how to crawl with it, then how to walk and then in the final guide, we’ll show you how to run with Magmi and create variation and multi-variation products.
You’ll be completing the steps that the “big boys” use every day in their expensive software solutions to get products into their multi-channel tool for then listing onto the marketplaces, but the difference is that you’ve most likely just paid peanuts to do exactly the same.
Lessons
1. Importing & Exporting Products in to Magento
With this guide we look at the options that we have available for when it comes to importing & exporting from Magento. There is some good news and some bad, as we dig deeper into M2E Pro and Magento. This guide is a high-level overview to what the options you have available and also sets the path to the guides that follow.
2. Introduction To Magento Dataflow
Here we'll meet Magento's Dataflow tools that are built right into Magento. We cover Magento's Dataflow very lightly in this guide and there are many reasons for that, such as flexibility & speed, but don't write-off Dataflow entirely
3. Say Hello To Magmi – The Swiss Army Knife for Magento
You'll be meeting Magmi for the first time in this guide and you'll find out what Magmi looks like if you install it yourself and what we've done to make it less Nerdy for you. Magmi is a Magento "Database client", not a "Magento extension". Magmi is what we call the "Swiss Army Knife" of import tools for Magento
4. How To Install Magmi
Magmi can be complicated to setup, you need to get the file permissions right, copy the details from your systems local.xml file, the plugins are not included by default, neither are the profiles and frankly it's 100% Nerd, but it doesn't need to be that way. In this guide we'll show you how to install Magmi using our custom built installation script that includes several key additions
5. One Setting For M2E Pro
For M2E Pro to pick up any changes to your database that Magmi makes, we need to tell M2E Pro to look for these changes. That is what we show you how to setup in this guide.
6. Using Magmi For Stock Updates
To get started with Magmi we need to learn to crawl and in this guide we'll show you how to update the stock levels on two products in Magento using Magmi. You might be thinking this is a bit basic and you're right we had to start somewhere and this was the safest place to start. In the next guides we'll be learning how to walk with Magmi and creating more comprehensive products and even multi-variations too
7. Importing Simple Products Using Magmi
In this guide you'll learn how to create a simple product in Magento. Remember that a simple product is just a product that has no variations and to create it in excel, we'll need to complete several fields in Excel that match the internal names used by Magento.
8. How To Find Column Names & Values for Magmi easily
This is an additional guide that we have put together which was suggested in the forums. The question we were asked was: "How do I find out the values for Tax Rate?" Which is a great question. In this quick guide we take it a step further and show you not only how to find out the values but also the column names you will need for your import spreadsheet.
9. Securing Magmi Further
This step is completely optional. Magmi is already quite secure and fingers crossed you shouldn't have any problems. However Magmi is a very powerful tool! If someone was able to gain access to it they would in theory be able to wreck havoc within your Magento system, so here we show you how to protect it a little further.
