As a shopping cart administrator, you will want the convenience of being able to export a select set of your product records in a CSV format, edit them using your favorite spreadsheet program, and import them back into your cart database to update the fields you changed. A typical scenario where you might do this is when you want to change the prices or meta tags of a select group of records.

When you update a set of product records, you must tell your shopping cart database how to uniquely identify each of those records. Typically, you do this by providing the product’s model number along with each record. The operating assumption, then, is that every product record in your system has its own unique model number. And you, as cart administrator, are responsible for ensuring this uniqueness.

Note also that the Zen Cart and osCommerce databases maintain, within each product record, an internal Product ID field that uniquely identifies the record. You can export this data value and use it as the unique identifier, if you like. The problem is that the Product ID is a system-generated number, and has little significance to a human, because we humans are not very good at remembering the correspondences between numbers and products.

ShopAdmin now includes a feature that lets you use either model number or product id, depending on your preference. When you wish to update your product records via import, you can now choose the lookup field based on which ShopAdmin should do the update (see the screen shot below).

This way, you can use either field for specifying your product records. The only additional requirement, of course, is that the lookup field you choose must be available in your CSV data.

Coupled with ShopAdmin’s new multi-lingual capability, you can now maintain your product catalog much easier than before.

We hope you find this feature useful. Please feel free to contact us with your feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and, of course, what you liked about ShopAdmin.

We are delighted to inform you that Apsona now offers Apsona ShopAdmin for Zen Cart and osCommerce free.  Please feel free to download and use Apsona ShopAdmin for  imports, exports, updates, reports and business analysis of your e-commerce site.

We at Apsona will continue to support and enhance the product for a long time to come. Many of our current users have provided valuable feedback.  We at Apsona genuinely wish to thank our  users for their advice and encouragement.

If you have not yet signed up to use Apsona ShopAdmin for your Zen Cart/osCommerce website , please visit http://apsona.com and click the on  “Sign up” link.

Best regards.
The Apsona team
http://apsona.com

Whilst I respect forum rules about not posting links to commercial services, I cannot help feeling slightly helpless as well. For example, on the osCommerce forum I saw  threads by users struggling to edit their products values. Some excerpts are below:

I love osCommerce, but an annoying thing about it, is that you can’t seem to bulk edit products, like select all the products you have and edit the product description or the product price in one go, rather then having to edit each product individually. (Posted 26 February 2010)

OR

Have you considered the add on Product Quick Edit? It still does them one at a time but much faster.

Such updates can be done with Apsona ShopAdmin with just a few clicks. No need of  SQL or coding.  You can mass update tens of records at the same time, with new values to 5 fields at one time.  Below is an example showing mass update or bulk editing to all the products in the Software category.

• In the Products table make a filter with the Category Software. If the filter exists just click the filter.
• Click Update All under Tools.
• Click the drop down and select the field. Enter the new value to the field.
• Click Update.

The screen shot shows 5  fields being updated at the same time. Results are seen instantly in the osCommerce application.

So  for all osCommerce  and Zen Cart users out there please try ShopAdmin for mass or bulk editing of your products.  Sign up for a free account and experience the Update All feature.

Easy Populate is a well-known shopping cart add-on for importing data records into the cart’s database. Though widely used, it seems to have some rough edges. For instance, it requires rigid adherence to its specific data format, and does not tolerate errors very well (see, for example, here, here and here).

At Apsona, as part of our ShopAdmin product’s emphasis on creating a better user experience, we set out to design a simple interface for importing data records. And we think we have succeeded. Our import wizard offers several niceties.

• It requires minimal user input. All you need to provide is a CSV file with a header line containing your field names, and tell it whether you use tabs or commas for separating fields. Or you can copy/paste the CSV data into a text box.
• It is smart about matching field names and data types. The fields in your CSV file can occur in any order you wish. If the field names in your header line match those that ShopAdmin knows about, it matches them automatically. But ShopAdmin gives you the freedom to match field names according to your needs. So your header line can use any field names you want, and you are not tied down to using exactly the names that it requires. This addresses one of Easy Populate’s shortcomings, and is of great value when you are importing data from a data source such as a partner’s data feed, over which you may have little or no control.
• It works with “overloaded” CSV files, which might contain extra columns that you might not wish to import. This situation is quite common in practical situations where you get your data records from a partner’s data feed. To handle such columns, you need only match the column to the “Do not import” option in the second step of the import wizard, and it will simply ignore that column.
• It matches data types before actually doing the import, thus minimizing import errors. It verifies that dates, currencies and numbers are all correctly formatted in your input. ShopAdmin also ensures that, when you are importing into a picklist field (such as order status), the value in the CSV input cell matches one of the allowed values in your database. This way, there will be no nasty surprises after you finish importing – once you have fixed your data errors (if any), you can be sure that all your data records will be imported.
• It tolerates multiple data formats. For instance, your data can contain dates in the format 2010-04-10 or 4-Apr-2010 or 4/10/2010, and ShopAdmin will work just fine. (Of course, 4/10/2010 is ambiguous – it means the 10th of April in the US, and the 4th of October in India. So, if you have dates in this format, you would need to set the preferred date format to the one you want.) In fact, you can even mix and match multiple date representations with different formats in the same CSV file, and ShopAdmin will still work. Similarly, your currency data can be written as $23,402.23 or 23402.23 and ShopAdmin will still store the data in the correct form.
• It checks for “required” field values. For example, the Zen Cart system requires that every customer record should have a valid email address. So when you are importing customer records, ShopAdmin validates this requirement and flags any errors it detects, before it begins the import process. This means fewer surprises for you – it works as you would expect it to.
• It includes an “update via import” feature. This is very valuable when, for example, you wish to perform a “mass edit” (or “mass update”) of one particular field in a lot of your records. For example, suppose you want to change the prices of several tens of your products. You export the Product ID and Price fields of the records in question (using ShopAdmin’s built-in export feature), edit the prices using your favorite spreadsheet program, and import the data back into the system as an “update”. The entire process is very quick and quite painless.

You can use ShopAdmin to import customers, products, product attributes or orders.

Overall, you will find that ShopAdmin’s import feature is far easier to use and more user-friendly. You can get more details about the import process via a screen-shot-based description or a video demonstration.

Try Apsona ShopAdmin – sign up now. We think you will like it.