Import new products in WooCommerce

Problem

You have an online store setup with WordPress + WooCommerce and now you are in need to add plenty of products. Adding one by one takes time so you’re looking for a way to automate this task and save time. This post is for you.

Solution

WooCommerce plugin has a built-in feature for importing products from CSV files. This is ideal for cases like

• adding tenths, hundreds, thousands of products in one go
• updating lots of products in batch
• adding products from other system

For this post, we will use a sample CSV file with 25 products already nicely defined. It is hosted at the official WooCommerce repository. The Comma Separated Value (CSV) file has its content in tabular format (rows and columns) as shown below:

let’s import it

Navigate to the dashboard -> Products tab as shown below:

Then, click Import

Then, on the next screen click Browse and select the CSV file

Click Continue to go to the “tricky” part of mapping columns to fields.

For example, if you’re importing a CSV from a different system and instead of “ID”, it has “uuid” or “code” or whatever word to represent the id column; well, this step is to make sure you correctly match the two despite their name.

In addition, you can skip importing one or more columns, as shown below:

For instance, you’re importing digital products, there is no need to specify weight, length or any dimensions nor weight.

By scrolling all the columns and making sure all looks good, it’s time to run the importer!

It will take few moments as it goes proportional to the number of products so it might be time to make a coffee.

Done! At the web host I currently use, it took less than 2 minutes.

Click View products to ensure that the new products appear in the products’ list.

Looks good at the backend! Let’s have a quick look at the frontend too by visiting the /shop endpoint.

The shop and the pictures also look correct! Congratulations!

Conclusion

In this post we saw the steps needed to follow in order to import a file with 25 products in one go! This is ideal when you need to avoid adding one by one and save time. The same process can be used to update products in bulk, for instance, all the stock levels got outdated and you wish to synchronize them back.