Woocommerce product import from CSV not working properly

Your question is a little confusing

You say that you have NOT checked the ‘update existing products’ and that when you import it doesn’t overwrite the existing product data?

That would be the expected behaviour – if that box it not checked it will only add new products

Howdy @ecotterell

Thank you for reaching about this.

only deleted some product lines (rows in the spreadsheet) and made changes to existing products.

From what I understand, you would like to bulk delete products (by deleting rows in the .CSV file), while also making changes on some other products. Correct?

Just to note, bulk deleting is not possible with the workflow of exporting the products .CSV file, subsequently deleting the rows of products we not offer anymore, and then importing it back to our WooCommerce store.

Could you please explain with further details what you are trying to do, overall, while also posting the exported and imported .CSV files, if necessary?

A picture is worth a thousand words, as the saying goes, therefore, feel free to share screenshots of anything that might help in explaining. https://snipboard.io/ is a good (online) tool of choice for sharing it here.

To help you further, I’d like to understand more about your setup.

Could you please send me a copy of your site’s System Status? You can find it via WooCommerce > Status. Select Get system report and then Copy for support.

Once you’ve done that, you can paste the text in https://gist.github.com/ and feel free to change/remove your site URL in the report for privacy reasons.

You can paste the Gist link here in your reply, once you have that.

Please let us know if you have any further questions about this matter, or if we misinterpret your concern in any way. We will be happy to help you further.

@seank123 Sorry you found my issue confusing. It is supposed to only overwrite the existing products when you check the box, not when you don’t. For completeness I tried importing with that box both checked and unchecked and got the same result. If you can help with my problem, feel free to respond further.

can you share a sample of your CSV – I regularly us the imported to update prices like this and not had an issue – I’ll happily try your file on a test site

@anastas10s I am a bit confused by your answer. I think my problem is clearly explained here. If you consider deleting a handful of lines in the spreadsheet as “bulk delete” and making a few changes to products I am retaining, yes that is what I am trying to do. Are you saying that the functionality no longer exists to overwrite my product catalogue through product import? What then, is the point of the export/import capability? I’m trying to save time by making the changes in the spreadsheet instead of manually in the dashboard.

Here is this gist you asked for https://gist.github.com/ecotterell/6794010606a5d44e961c19b0ca8ac38c

I look forward to getting a helpful answer to this problem.

Updating existing products does work – but you can’t delete products by not including them in the CSV upload!

@seank123 so can you please explain what the point of having that check box is when I get the same outcome whether it is checked or not? I used to use a plugin for this and that is how the plugin works, now I know why people pay for plugins.

Hi,

Can you provide a copy of your CSV file? You can leave it with 1-2 products, so that we can check better.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Howdy.

We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to go ahead and mark this thread as resolved. If you have any other questions please start a new thread.

Cheers!