Shopify has an import feature built in, but are you sure it’s the best way to upload information about your products?
As a retailer, you need to find the suppliers you will work with if you use drop shipping. We already showed you the best ways to do this. You can reach them at least seven different ways. If you’ve done all of these things, you also need to know how to get product information from your suppliers and how to use your own product information. You can do these things by hand, with tools for finding products, with a web scraper, or with a database.
One of the last things you need to do is add the items to your store. You can use the bulk Import feature that comes with Shopify, but it’s probably not the best way to run your store. Below, you can learn more about this built-in feature and what we can do for you.
Speed up the manual uploading process
If you only have a few items, you can upload the information about them by hand. It’s a long process, and you might have trouble with it, so Shopify helps you “quasi-automate” and speed up your work. With this solution, you can add more items to your store at the same time. No matter which upload method you use – as we said at the beginning, you don’t have to use Shopify’s built-in function – your work will be much easier and your business could do better if you don’t do everything by hand without any help.
What can you do with the Import function that is already built in?
If you don’t have any products in your store yet, you can upload some to Shopify and they will show up there, but only if you use the same format.
If you already have products in your store and fill out the CSV table in the same way, Shopify will know what you’re doing and update the information in your store.
Some people try to do the things before and after by hand so they can get their work done faster.After that, they change it and reupload it with the information about the new products. But it’s not that easy. If the list is long and you have hundreds of thousands of products in the format your supplier uses, it can feel like an eternity until you compare and find which product or data is missing and from where, etc. There are also many ways to do something wrong. This is the biggest problem with using this method that comes with the computer.
Another problem is that you can’t do it all by yourself; it needs your help. You have to export it, change it, compare it, and do everything else that needs to be done with the table. Also, you have to change it, re-upload it, and make sure it works… This is something you have to do every day. In the long run, you won’t be able to do it.
So, what’s the point of Shopify’s built-in Importer?
At first, it was made to make it easier to manipulate small amounts of data, like a list of fifty products. So, if you have a shop and want to get the information from it into another Shopify store, it’s easy to do. But in real life, it can only be used for small tasks. If you use this built-in function, you can’t work with the database and data feed you get from your supplier.