Importing of products from old CMS to Magento

Question

I’m fairly new to Magento so you’ll have to bear with me. My task is to import a number of products from our old cms into magento via a csv file. As the attributes in both CMS’ don’t match I’m thinking my best course of action would be to export a product from Magento then use that exported CSV file as a template for copying in the data from my products list to match the best I can. When I come across attributes that don’t already exists, I’ll just make a custom one to match.

What do you think? Is there a better and faster way? Initially I was hoping there would be a way to define my own custom product type so I can just import my products with matching attributes.

Axel Axel · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-08T21:16:53

If you give more detail about the type of attributes you are trying to import, I can give you a better answer.

Magento's attribute system is designed to be extremely flexible out of the box. You can create a variety of attribute types and their conditions in the backend under Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes.

To import your products, you can first create the attributes you require under Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes, then assign them to an attribute set under Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attribute Sets. Then create a few test products in Magento. Finally, export those products under System > Import/Export > Export. That will generate a CSV which you can then use as a template.

If your goal is importing a lot of products (say over 1000), I would recommend using Magmi, a custom built Magento importer that bypasses the apis and imports the products directly into the database. Magento's built in import methods are extremely slow as they utilize the heavy framework Magento is built upon. Magmi helps bypass the bottlenecks and import thousands of products within seconds.

Importing of products from old CMS to Magento

2 Answers