How to Add Multiple Products in Woocommerce

Woocommerce is one of the leading Open Source Plugins associated with WordPress. Created by Mike Jolley & James Koster on 27th September 2011 Woocommerce is being used by more than 4 Million Websites across the World. It has observed more than 40 Million Downloads and in 2017 alone 

Woocommerce was responsible for approximately 10 Billion Dollars of Sales worldwide. They are recognized as one of the world’s most trusted E-Commerce Plugins & platforms. It is a great option for online sale.

You need to follow certain steps to list your product on Woocommerce. 

In case you want to add multiple products at the same time, the process changes a bit from that to add a Single Product.

As of Version 3.1, Woocommerce has an inbuilt CSV Importer and Exporter (For those who do not know, CSV is an Extension of Microsoft Office Excel Files that you can select from dropdown while saving your workbook). For adding Multiple Products, this CSV Tool should be used. It gets things done much quicker.

You can download an existing CSV File from Storefront or create your own CSV to include the information you want. There are certain guidelines to follow while creating the CSV File.

• CSV should be created in UTF-8 Format.
• While mentioning the Date and Time, refer to the local timezone of the Brand.
• Multiple Values in a single field gets separated by Comma.
• Any product in the Draft Version can not be exported. Only Published versions are allowed for export.
• If you’re referring to an existing product id, please add “id:” as the prefix. Though in the case of referring to an SKU.
• Any Taxonomy related Term Hierarchy needs to be denoted with “>” and separated by a comma.

Steps to Add Multiple Products at Once

1. Open Woocommerce and go to the Products tab.
2. At the top of the screen, select the Import option. Select “Upload CSV”.
3. On the next screen select the CSV file with the Browse option.
4. Once the file is selected, you can choose the Delimiter option. By default, it is a comma but you can select a Semicolon or some other symbol as well to define the CSV.
5. Also in case of updating existing products, you can tick the “Upload Existing Products” option while uploading.
6. In the Next Tab named “Column Mapping,” you have to map the name of the Columns such as ID, SKU, Name, Type etc. to the fields available in the CSV so that the data can be interpreted properly.
7. In case you don’t want to skip any field, you can select the Do Not Import option from the dropdown against that field.
8. Next, you have to run the Importer with the similarly named button at the bottom. Now your part is done. Wait till the Importer runs. Make sure you do not refresh the browser when the Importer is running, otherwise the import will fail and you will have to start all over again.
9. Once the Import is completed, you will be able to see a message on the screen showing how many new products or items got added to your listings or how many existing products got updated. You can check the Import Log to check the process in a detailed version.

Now, apart from CSV Uploads from your local computer, there are two other methods that can be used to perform this bulk upload task though these are a bit tedious compared to uploading from a local computer.

1. Uploading through FTP Server
2. Uploading through URL

Uploading Through FTP Server

If you have to import the CSV File from a Remote Server, you can do so using FTP. Follow the below steps;

1. First, you need to check the FTP Import/Export Box.
2. Give your FTP hostname
3. Enter Username and Password
4. Provide the FTP Port Number
5. Next comes FTP Server Path
6. Check FTPS Box for Secure Transfer

Uploading Through URL

In case the CSV File is already available on any other server, you can enter the URL of the CSV file so that it can be downloaded from the server and the products can be imported to the Woocommerce Website. You will need a Mapping File to map the Fields to the Columns of the website. While importing you can choose the mapping file to skip the manual mapping.

These Days handling the Products on Woocommerce has become very easy and you won’t need any Technical Knowledge to operate.