How to Import WooCommerce Products

You can import WooCommerce Products from any file with WP All Import:

1. Create a new import and select WooCommerce Products
2. Drag & drop data from your file to the WooCommerce import fields
3. Choose to create new products, update existing products, or both
4. Click ‘Confirm & Run’ to import products, images, price, stock, and everything else

You can upload pretty much any file type and any file size. It doesn’t matter how your data is organized, what the column headers are, or anything like that. The page where you set up your product import looks very similar to WooCommerce, so instead of reorganizing your data like other import plugins require, with WP All Import you just drag and drop the data from your file into WordPress. When you run your import it will automatically update existing products, make new ones, import images, set stock and price, etc.

Creating a new import in WP All Import

First, we need to create a new import. WP All Import gives you three options when choosing your import feed or file:

• Upload a file: manually upload a file from your computer.
• Download from URL: paste in the URL to your import feed.
• Use existing file: use a file that already exists on your server.

The feed I’m using is coming from another WordPress site that uses WP All Export to export their product data to Dropbox, so I’m going to paste in the URL to Dropbox file inside the “Download from URL” field and select WooCommerce Products in the drop-down menu.

Here you can choose to import new products or update existing products (which also allows you to create new products). I’m importing new products, so I’ll leave “New Items” enabled and continue to step 3.

Mapping import elements in WP All Import

On this step, we’ll map the columns from our file to the import fields. WP All Import has implemented a drag and drop system and a user interface that looks just like WordPress & WooCommerce, so there’s no guessing where you need to drag the data to. This really does make importing WooCommerce products to your store just as intuitive as manually creating them.

First, let’s map the title, description, and short description.

Mapping WooCommerce Product Price & Stock

Now, we’ll open the “WooCommerce Add-On” section, which is where we can map all of our product data.

In the general tab, we can choose the product type, SKU, prices, and many other things. WP All Import supports all built-in WooCommerce product types (Simple, Variable, Grouped, External/Affiliate), and we’re importing variable products, so I’ve chosen that in the product type drop-down.

For the price fields, I just need to import the regular and sale prices as-is, but WP All Import does allow you to schedule a sale price period, or adjust the prices (by percentage or a set amount) from right within the UI.

In the inventory tab of the WooCommerce Add-On, we can control everything about our stock. Do we want to manage stock? Should the product be in stock, out of stock, or set automatically based on the stock value? What about backorders? You can choose the radio options, or use an import element, or use static text for all of these fields.

Now that we’ve told WP All Import how to import our WooCommerce Product prices and stock, we can continue to the “Linked Products” tab. Here, you can import a comma-delimited list of up-sells and cross-sells. Products can be found by SKU, Title, or Product ID.

Next, in the attributes tab, we can define each attribute that belongs to our products and decide if they’re variation attributes with the “In Variations” option. My products only vary in color, so that’s all I need to define here.

In the “Advanced” tab, we can import purchase notes, the menu order, set the reviews and feature statuses, and choose the catalog visibility. I’m happy with the defaults, so I’ll just leave these options as-is.

Import variable WooCommerce products

In the “Variations” tab, we’ll choose how to connect the variable products and variations in our import file. WP All Import actually has a tutorial that thoroughly covers how to import variable products into WooCommerce, and you’ll find that the options they provide will cover pretty much any CSV or XML file format that you come across. My file contains parent products and variations, so I can use the first option to connect them together.

If my file didn’t have parent products, no problem, WP All Import has an option for that. The import plugins I’ve used in the past weren’t like this – they had very specific requirements that usually forced me to manually edit my product file before it would work, which just isn’t feasible with thousands of rows. WP All Import is the total opposite of that, it’s completely flexible and works with any format, which is another reason why it’s my favorite plugin to use when I need to import WordPress and WooCommerce data.

Finally, we have the “Add-On Options” tab, which you probably won’t need to touch, but it does have an option that I thought was really cool. The “Set out of stock status for missing records” option will watch the import on future runs and check for any products that have been removed from the feed/file – if it finds missing ones, it will set their stock status to “Out of stock”.

Importing WooCommerce Product Images & Galleries

Next, we need to import our product images. WP All Import allows you to import images via URL, use images that already exist in your Media Library, or use images that you’ve uploaded to your server. You can even have WP All Import scan through the post content and automatically import the images and update their links. Pretty cool!

I have image URLs, so I’ll go ahead and drag that element into the image field and preview it.

Looks great. Next, we can open the “SEO & Advanced Options” section to import SEO data like Titles, Alt Texts, and more.

Import WooCommerce Product Categories, Tags, and Brands

In the “Taxonomies, Categories, Tags” section, we can choose exactly which categories and tags our products are assigned to. You can import single categories, multiple categories, or define nested/hierarchical categories. WP All Import will search for existing categories and use those, or create new ones if they don’t exist.

Final import settings

On the final step we can tell WP All Import exactly what we want to do with our data:

• Create new products from records newly present in your file
• Delete products that are no longer present in your file
• Update existing products with changed data in your file

I just want to create new products and update those products in subsequent runs of the import, so those are the only options I need here.

Scheduling WooCommerce Product Imports

The biggest reason anyone would use plugins to import data into WordPress is to save time. That’s why automatic scheduling is such a huge feature, and WP All Import does it right. In the “Scheduling Options” section, we can set our import to run automatically on any schedule using their intuitive user interface. When it runs, it will download the latest version of our Dropbox file, then create/update/delete products using the new data, without any manual intervention. I’m going to set my import to run at 3 am every day of the week.

Running the import

Let’s go ahead and run the import, then sit back and relax as WP All Import creates thousands of products for us.

This import brought in all 2,292 of my products, including their images and categories, in just about 38 minutes. The time saved by this plugin is just unbelievable. Let’s take a look at our product list.

Looks good, let’s check out the shop view.

Awesome, we’re done! Building this product list manually would have been incredibly tedious, and probably would have taken weeks, but we just did it in well under an hour thanks to WP All Import.