Importing Products without Affecting Inventory

Michael_Slebodn
Visitor
1 0 0

Hello -

 

I'm doing a dev job and overhauling the product tagging structure, image sizes, and various layout bits and pieces. There's a decent amount of products (200) so my plan is to do a batch export, import to my dev site, make changes, then import onto the live site. My only concern is inventory. In a perfect world, I wouldn't want inventory to be affected whatsoever, since the live site will continue to change inventory while I'm developing. Is there a way to import, using the same product handles, without affecting inventory?

 

Thank you in advance!

 

-Mike

Replies 3 (3)

Dallas
Shopify Staff (Retired)
916 61 211

Hi, there.

 

Dallas here from the Social Care Team.

 

You may have tried this already, but from my understanding of what you're saying, I think that you're going to want to work with the CSV file of the products. If you export the CSV, make the adjustments, and then just upload that CSV back again without touching the inventory column you should be good to go. Since this is a live store you can just leave the store up and running and still make all of the adjustments necessary.

 

When you re-upload the CSV you'll have the option to overwrite all the old products with the same handle.

 

16-07-daeg4-zyk2m

 

If you want the items to showcase the updated changes without having to skip a beat of selling during this process, you'll just need to make sure that when you work with the CSV file you don't adjust the handles at all. If you do that you'll end up adding a duplication of each product to your store. Does that make sense?

 

If you're not familiar with using CSV's I have a great guide for just that!

 

To export the file you'll just go to your Store Admin, click on Products > Export and you'll have the option to download two different versions of the file. I suggest avoiding Excel and working with Google Sheets since that seems to work better with the system. In that case, you can click on "Plain CSV file".

When you go back to import the file you'll just need to click Import at the top of the page, it's located to the right of the Export button, and then you can make sure that this box is checked.

16-57-g18kl-tip9o

 

That'll allow for the overwrite.

 

 

Once you do that you should be good to go. Can you read over the link I gave and see if that will work for you?

 

Best, 

Dallas 

To learn more visit the Shopify Help Center or the Community Blog.

DomMcI
Visitor
1 0 0

Hi Dallas,

 

The piece that is not clear is that Variant Inventory Qty is a required field and if reimported blank the system will default the value to 0. 

 

How can you export the product CSV from a live site, have sales occur while editing the CSV therefore altering the inventory values from what is in the CSV files and then import the CSV and allow Shopify to maintain the correct value of inventory? It seems that the CSV value will always overwrite the accurate inventory value held in Shopify. Am I missing something?

Prairie-Spirit
Visitor
2 0 0

If I understand you, you are wanting to change "products export" not "inventory export" that is the difference right? One will only adjust the inventory qty, the other is the rest of the values.