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Online Help |
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With Miva Merchant you can export product information to a flat file — a plain–text file containing set types of data separated by a tab or text character. You can edit this file in any text editor or import it into a spreadsheet. Use the data elsewhere or edit it and import the results back into Miva Merchant. This is an easy way to make changes to many products at once (such as an overall price increase) or to copy products to another of your stores.
Specify a name for the file where you will export the product information. The default is products.dat.
You might find it useful to include the date or other detail in the file name like prods-2006-EOY.dat or products-Q3-2007.dat. The file will be saved on the server under Merchant5/s01/export/filename.dat where s01 indicates your first store. If you have additional stores the directory will correspond to the store number (s02, s03, etc.).
Select All or specify a range of products to export.
The products are exported in the same order as you have specified in the product list. If your product list is displayed in alphabetical order the product will be exported in alphabetical order.
When exporting ranges of products to several files, name the files to indicate the ranges, like prods-0001-0500.dat, prods-0501-1000.dat, and so on.
If you have a large number of products you might prefer to divide the export into a series of files. This could help avoid server timeouts that can occur with large files. Depending on the amount of data associated with each product (detailed descriptions, customized inventory messages, and so on), a rule of thumb would be to include about 500 products in each data file.
Select Export Only Products In Category if you are making a price change across one product line or copying all the products from that category into a second store.
Select Include Category List if you want the category codes included in the data for each product. When a product belongs to more than one category all the applicable category codes will be listed separated by commas and spaces. For example: SEEDS, FLOWERS, SEASONAL, FULL-SUN.
To export products with no category information select Ignore Categories. A column titled CATEGORY_CODES will be created but no category codes will be exported.
Product data can be exported in a format optimized for importing back into Miva Merchant or in Provisioning Format which is used by hosting companies.
If you are planning to edit the information and then import it back into the store you might also want to read about Importing Products from a Flat File.
Select each custom field to export.
Specify how you want the data handled if a file of the same name as that you have specified already exists. Select Append To File to have the newly — exported data added on to the end of the existing file. Select Replace File to discard the earlier version and save only the data currently being exported.
Select this if you want the top row of the file to display the names of the fields. This can make the file much easier to read and you can always delete the row later in a text editor or spreadsheet program.