Import/Export Items from one cart to another

[DaveW]

I have 3 3d carts. We want to start cross posting some of our products on more than one of the carts at a time (they are all unique products right now).

I exported the products from one cart, did the edits to image links, etc and imported to the other cart.

Where I am hung up is on the options. A lot of these options are clothing with sizes.

I am not having any luck exporting options and re-importing them.

Is there a better way? Is there an import log so I can see exactly what is going on when it fails?

I tried to export some options the other day to make changes and re-import to the same cart and never got that to work either. :( Yes, I deleted the category_id column.

And, MS Excel related - some of my product options are "-SM" for the option ID. WHen I import these to Excel, it puts an #NAME error in the cell becuase it thinks it is reference to a cell. :( Any ideas how to turn that off in Excel besided manually editing the cells?

Thanks,

DaveW

[DaveW]

OK, I managed to fix my own issues here and figured I would post so future (idiots) don't have to fight it as hard. :)

To fix the #name issue in Excel, IMPORT the data from the CSV download, specifying that column as "TEXT". If CSV is set to open with Excel and you just open the file, it will do the #name thing, breaking the file. This issue is caused by us using hyphens in our option part numbers (e.g. -SM)

To import fresh set of options, read the directions. :) Oddly enough, the last thing I did.

1) Export options from cart a
2) Import CSV file.
3) Delete Category ID column completely.
4) Remove information from the optionid, catalogid and featureid columns. The system will generate these on import.

5) Not related to this import set, but something we had happen in the past: If you have duplicate product ID's it will make the option import go nuts. We have products where the Product ID is "CRB-" and the options bring the rest of the part number so the final number passed by the cart would be CRB-20991 or something like that.

If you import options under this circumstance, it will stack all the options on the first product as the option import is keyed off "productID" We just temporarily changed the product ID's when we had this happen.

I hope this helps people doing this in the future. :)

DaveW