How to peacefully migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2

How to peacefully migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2

In your e-merchant life, someday, you may need to import your products to Magento. It may be because:

• you are opening an online store, and you want to add a large number of products
• you are migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2, and you need to transfer your product data
• you already have an e-commerce website and want to transfer the existing products to your brand new Magento 2 store
• you need to move product data from a dropshipping platform

For each one of the above reasons, this guide will help you.

Firstly, we’ll detail Magento’s default import system and how it works. Then, we’ll propose a more practical solution for importing your products to your Magento 2 store.

Magento’s native import system: included but minimal

Magento import tool is a base that all customers have in their instance. Those who have already dabbled in the default Magento tool have indeed done it the hard way.

At least the Magento import tool exists, but it is minimal:

• designed for internal Magento work
• very restricted use cases
• not intuitive
• slow: importing 100 products takes 1 minute, importing 1000 products takes an hour
• Not flexible
• CSV file only, no XML or JSON
• no files on remote servers
• no management of configurable products
• Hyper-restrictive columns naming
• No preview of the import file
• No reindex option
• No post-process action for the file
• No action for missing products

How it works

Magento’s default import tool is available in all instances from:
System › Data Transfer › Import

As said previously, the tool is very basic and simply consists of filling in some import settings, import behavior, and adding the file to import.

After clicking on Check Data, you may be able to import your file if it is recognized as valid by Magento, which seems very complicated.

Seen like that, Magento’s default tool is quite easy to learn, however, it does not allow a wide range of possibilities and can be a real headache to use.

What to know before importing data?

CSV files are mainly used when importing products. We will focus on this format.

What are CSV files?

CSV stands for Comma-Separated Value. This format is represented by tabular data as text. The values in each cell are separated by commas or semicolons.

CSV files are very easy to understand as each line of text corresponds to a row in the table and each comma corresponds to a separation between the columns.

How to edit CSV files and how it works

When creating or editing a CSV file, you must respect a few rules:

1. No line break: each line must be completed. If you want some cells in the table to be empty, you still have to add the commas.
2. Each row must have the same number of fields, ie commas.
3. No unnecessary spaces: "Product 1" and not "Product 1 " or " Product 1".

You can export your sheet to a CSV file from any web or desktop sheet editor.

Make sure your sheet program is configured to use UTF-8 coding. Some programs make it difficult to export a properly coded CSV file.

Steps to import your products to Magento

This guide explains how to meet the functional needs of product imports. You can reproduce our step-by-step on our demo store.

You’ll need the following files:

• The CSV source file (lien de téléchargement)
• The configuration file for the profile (lien de téléchargement)

Step 1: Prepare the data

In order to import your products in peace, the first step would be to prepare the source file.

If you don’t have a source file including your product data, you could easily create one using Google Sheets for example. You must include a unique product identifier per row, for example, the SKU, and one data entry per cell.

This is an example of a CSV file (lien pour télécharger le fichier .csv) that we have generated using our Data Feed Manager extension. See how to generate and download a data feed with Data Feed Manager.

Step 2: Configure the import profile

Once your source file is all set, you can start configuring the import profile of our Mass Product Import & Update extension.

First, enable and give a name to the profile. Define the profile method on Import new products only and drag your source file from your desktop in the File location section (you can also use Magento File System, a URL, or FTP server…).

Then, give more details about your source file type. In our example, we define the file in the CSV format, with “;” as the column separator, no text delimiters, the first line is a header and no Magento export file.

In the Post Process Action section, select Run only the required indexers.

From the black box, click on Input data. You can now save the profile.

Step 3: Specify the import file

As we’re focusing on the basics of the extension, we won’t detail the Advanced settings here, but note that it includes many configuration possibilities for the system, stocks, images, categories, configurable products…

The Mapping & rules tab is where this is all about! There you can link Magento’s attributes to the data of your source file. We have defined our profile that way:

Download our configuration profile (lien pour télécharger le fichier .conf) and import the file to our demo store. See how to import a configuration profile with Mass Product Import & Update.

Step 4: Check the data and finish the importing

The preview tool will help you to have a look at the output data. In fact, it helps you a lot during all the configuration steps as you’re able to check what you’re doing is right.

You can click on Run Profile Now.

Congratulations! Your products have been imported.

See also

How to start a dropshipping business with Magento

How to open a new sale channel with Google Shopping Actions

How to bring business to your store with Local inventory ads