Import Products with Categories by ID instead?

[Nerd Life]

Hi,
Is there a way to import products and assign them to categories and sub-categories without using the categoryname/ and @ type method?

I have been using Prestashop for 7 years and the 3dcart method seems so very inefficient and poorly implemented. I have thousands of products to import and in Prestashop the are imported and exported by category ID and multiple categories are separated by a semi-colon.

I am going to have to do a find and replace on all my old Category ID # data to get the category names in there before import. Some products are in over 20 categories, that is a lot of text in the category field.

So is there a better way with out replacing all the old ID numbers with mountains of text?

Thanks

[bzeltzer]

Pretty sure you're stuck with mountains of text. One word of caution though, if you get a part of the structure, any of the text or text case wrong, you'll end up creating extra categories when you import. It's a good idea to export your categories after importing the products in order to see which new categories you accidentally created. They'll appear at the bottom and have the highest IDs. If you accidentally repeat a category on an item, that breaks something as well but just for that item. It is the biggest pains with 3dcart. I implemented a copy/paste only rule with my content writers some years ago.