Prestashop 1.6 | Product import through CSV tips

Recently I have been uploading lots of products to the website http://www.assamesebooks.com
The upload was done through uploading a CSV file with all the product details.
The "Sample" CSV file to upload products is provide by Prestashop.

1. To begin with navigate to the upload product CSV screen from the menu

Catalog -> Products - > click on the small import icon above the search button to navigate to the import CSV screen

Products Menu under Catalog

The import icon as highlighted

The CSV import Page

2. There are few import import settings on this page i.e.

• Field Separator - This is the separator by how the individual columns in you CSV are separated. By default it is semicolon (;) so please be mindful of changing it if your file is a comma separated one
• Multiple Value Separator - There are times when you have multiple values for a column. For example multiple Meta-keywords.  In that case you need to use the separator you mention here in the file.
• Delete All products before import - I think this is self explanatory and a dangerous option. Use wisely as the products get deleted before the import starts. Which means even if there is a failure during the import; the products are already deleted.
• Force all ID numbers - Use this option in case you want the ID in your CSV file to be used instead of auto generated by the database.

3. The sample CSV file can also be downloaded from this page. You can find it in the lower right corner side of the page. 

4. On the next page you need to MAP the columns in the CSV file to the expected values by Prestashop for product upload. This step is super important. 

Please select the data from the drop down which is represented by the CSV column.

Another important setting here is "Lines to skip". Use this option to skip the header row from your CSV file. If your CSV has no header then give this as 0 to read and process all the rows in the CSV.

You can also save your mapping by giving some name and clicking the save button. This way; next time when you plan to upload the CSV you don't have to do all the mappings.

5. Finally you are ready to start the import process. Click on the IMPORT button the the bottom of
the page.

6. Before we wrap up, I would share some tips of the way data is captured in the CSV file. Most of the columns in the CSV is self explanatory but some need special guidance. Below screen shot has those important column from my CSV file.

• Tags - A tag is used to group related products with same search term. For EX: if we search for History then books under all categories related to History should come up who are tagged with the term History. It is a multi value column. You can give multiple values separated using the separator.
• URL rewritten - This is supposed to be used to make SEO friendly URLs but some how populating this value in the CSV gives weird errors. So, I prefer keeping this column empty. In that case Prestashop auto generates the URL rewritten value based on the product name which as per me is a desired solution.
• Image URLs -  This is again a multi valued column cause a product can have many images and you can give the URL of all those images separated by the separator. The funny thing is how do we get the URL of the images of a product that you are trying to upload.
  What I did is that I created a folder in the root of my server i.e. at public_html named a productImages and uploaded all the images here. Hence, the URL for the images became as "http://assamesebooks.com/productImages/AD00636.jpg". I used this URL in the CSV.
• Feature(Name:Value:Position) - This is the most complex to understand column and the MOST important one too. This is important cause it helps us upload custom attributes of the product. For example products on http://assamesebooks.com had attributes like pages numbers, Author, Translator, year of publication etc.
  First of all we need to register our custom attributes in Prestashop. This can be done by following menu item i.e.
  
  
  
  Catalog - > ProductFeatures
  
  
  Post which you can mention all of these attributes / features along with their values in the same column separated by multi value separator. For example :
  
  Sub Title:War Book;Author:Anu Barua;Publisher:Purbanchal Prakash;Publication Year:2015;ISBN:978-81-7213-254-5;Language:Assamese;Pages:164;Weight (gms):286
  
  
  
  

  It took me nice 1 hour to figure out how to do this :-)

Hope these tips help some one save valuable time.. :-P