**Update: It is no longer necessary to change the "from" row to 2 before importing. By default it is set to 2 and the first row is visible so you can use it for mapping.
This video shows the process of importing your product data into GroovePacker. For more information on the CSV file format and an example file, please see this article.
In most cases you can export your product data from your Shopping Cart or your Order Manager and select only those fields you want to import.
Exporting Product data from ShipStation
Exporting Product data from Shopify
If barcodes or other needed fields are not present you can add them to the file before importing or use a second file to update the products with data from another file.
This article shows the process of updating or adding additional product data by mapping the SKU and the fields you want to add or update.
The SKU is used as the common attribute which ensures that the new data is properly matched with the existing product.
Video Transcription
One of the first things you want to do when you're getting started with Group Packer is import your product data using a CSV file. The first step is to export the data from the order manager or shop and cart of your choice. You can then edit this in Open Office or another spreadsheet editor. I like to use Open Office because it has all the options and it's free. I'm going to open the file that I've downloaded from Shipstation and I've already renamed it here. There are a couple of things to pay attention to when you open it. Make sure that the character set is UTF-8. If you happen to have UPCs or SKUs that have leading zeros, it's a really good idea to select all these fields and import them as text. This will ensure that the leading zeros don't get dropped. You can see in this file I've removed many of the extra columns that I didn't need. There are acquired items to import into Group Packer for the products. Would be the SKU, the name, and the barcode. Everything else is optional. You'll probably want to also import warehouse location, wait, and you can have secondary barcodes and secondary SKUs as well.
The full list of things that you can import, you'll see in the drop-downs in the importer map or window. So here I'm missing one of the required fields, the UPC or barcode. This is important because without the barcode you cannot scan the items. So there are a couple of ways to add this information if you don't have it in the data source that you export from. One of those is to just scan it in right here in the spreadsheet. If you have a smaller product catalog, this works really well. If you have a lot of products and you have another spreadsheet that has the same SKU associated with the barcode, you can merge that data in. It's possible to merge two CSV files using OpenOffice. Or if you'd like some help with that, you can send us the file and we can merge it with your existing data in Group Packer. You'd start by importing everything else and then the merge would add the barcode based on the common SKU. One thing to check in your CSV file is that there aren't blank rows in between the rows of data that will cause an issue during the import. Once your product data is set up the way you want it, go ahead and save the file as a CSV and the UTF-8 format.
Now we're ready to import our product data into GroovePacker. As you can see, all of my product data is currently empty. So first I'm going to go over to the Settings section and create a new store for my product CSV. We'll call it Product CSV. And we'll change the store type to CSV. Then we scroll down and under Product Import we choose the file that we saved earlier. Because there's no map saved for this file already, it will let us create one now. So you can see the column headers in the file. Let us know which each should be mapped to. Since we don't have UPC barcode information here, we'll leave that unmapped.
Now that all of our fields are mapped, we can go back up to the top and we can change the From Row option to 2. This will make sure that the column headers don't get imported as a product. Sometimes it takes a second to complete the change. We can see the column headers are gone. We can name this so that we can use it again next time. And hit Import. It'll queue the import and give us messages on its progress. Now when we go to the Product section, we'll find our products under New Products. The reason they're not Active is because they do not have a barcode. If you happen to be using your barcode as a SKU, you can select items and generate the barcode from the SKU. Adding the barcode information here would be easy as well. Just right-click in the barcode field and then scan it in. When it saves, it'll automatically move the products over to the Active Products list because they have everything they need to be scanned. And that's all there is to it to import your product data into Groove Packer. Thanks for watching. Bye.