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.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2010 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Shopping carts, Zen cart, osCommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.