You're able to import and export large volumes of data into Miva Merchant using a flat file import and export system. You can find the settings pertaining to importing and exporting under the Data Management area of the Store Admin. With Data Management you're able to import categories, products, product inventory, customer information, shipping information and product variants.
So let's say you want to import multiple products into your store. You're going to need a flat file, like an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file. There are two ways you can get one, You can click on “Click on Export Products to Flat File” and have the stores send you a list of existing products in your store, or you can click on “Import Settings,” “Add/Update Products from CSV” and click this “CSV template” button. It will download a blank CSV file that will aid you in uploading multiple products to your store. The flat file will look something like this you may have to adjust the width of the different columns to be able to read what each column is for. Each row in the spreadsheet represents a different product you want to import and each column represents a specific type of data for that product. At the bare minimum for you to be able to import a product into the store, you will need to have a value defined under the product code and the product name. If I uploaded this flat file to my Miva Merchant store, these two products will successfully be added to the store database. But this third product will fail to upload, because it's missing a product name and the fourth product will fail to upload, because it's missing a product code. All other columns in this flat file are considered optional and you do not have to have anything in them for you to successfully add products to your store. If you're using this flat file method to import multiple products into your store, chances are there are a few more details you might want to include; such as this column for the category code. You can type in the code of the category that you want these products to appear in. Next is the price column where you can tell the store how much you want to sell these products for. This column should only have a number. Special characters, like dollar signs should not be included into this field.
This column allows you to define how much this product weighs. This is useful for Real Time shipping calculators to determine how much shipping a product will cost. You could enter the product's description in this column. This column will be able to receive plain text or HTML markup. Hear you're able to tell the store if you want the product to be taxable. Type in one for taxable or 0 for non-taxable. If you want to upload the products information into the store, but you don't want the product to be viewable you can set it as not active. Under the active column type in a 0 for not active, or one for active. Lastly I want to mention that there are columns called “Thumbnail URL” and “Image URL.” These two columns pertain to the Legacy method of importing product images into your store. There is a better way of adding product images to your store, but we'll cover that in another video.
When you're done working in the spreadsheet and you want to upload this product information into your store, save your work as a .CSV file. Back in your Admin under Data Management, click on “ADD Update Products from CSV.” Click the Choose File” button and browse to the location on your hard drive where you saved your CSV file. Choose it and you'll see a report detailing the import process. And you've successfully imported your product information.