I noticed the categories are not part of the product export.
Is there a reason?
Can that be part of the import/export process?

Thanks Matt

I think it's an important part of the product import. It would be a time saver assigning product to there categories in the import tool. It's much faster working with the products in a spreadsheet than doing in a browser. Particularly if you have multiple products I the same category.
And assigning the category id's isn't any different that asigning the manufacture id's.

Just my thoughts...

I don't see an advantage to setting the sort order in the product template. If there was a category import/export, it would be nice there.

Any idea when this feature might be added? I used it all the time back when the import/export tool from Marcus worked. I was disappointed to find it had been removed. I was so excited to import my first group of new items last night only to find out that I have to go into each one individually and mark the category.

Thanks

We had a customized version of the BVC5 Import Tool that would allow us to map products to categories. This was helpful for mapping a single product to 100's of categories, if needed, in seconds. I've tried it on BVC2013 but it didn't work - although the Import Tool still works for products and categories, just not our custom version. Attached is the template we would use to map the products.

Aaron

The bvin is for the main or first (root) category. I'll use the bike shop as an example.

bvin: 189404f3-0768-4bbf-9420-ea37c457b0d7 (whatever the main / root category is).
RootCategory: BMX (name of the main / root category)
SubCategory1: BMX Pedals (first SubCategory under BMX)
SubCategory2: N/A
SubCategory3: N/A
SubCategory4: N/A
SubCategory5: N/A
SKU: ABC39 (product SKU - Diamondback Sound Pedal)

Obviously for the example I skipped SubCategory2-5 but depending of the SubCategory count these could be used.

Matt

Edited by user Tuesday, October 15, 2013 9:21:23 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

I agree that having a field for specifying category bvins probably won't be very useful for most users. I ended up writing my own custom import scripts to migrate a catalog from another ecommerce database (using Catalog.Category.AddProduct() to add the products to the categories), so I haven't had a chance to use the new import/export tool much yet, but here are my thoughts:

I think the most user friendly way would be to have a column in the spreadsheet to specify categories using a delimiter, and using an additional character to specify hierarchy.

For example, the pipe character "|" could separate categories while the greater than sign ">" could show hierarchy.

It may be useful to assume that all categories specified are top-level categories unless hierarchy has been noted.

Example:

"Top Category A|Top Category B"

or

"Top Category A > Sub-Category 1|Top Category B > Sub-Category 2"

These would search categories based on the name, which could introduce some problems, but if there are two categories with the same name, we could just put the product in the first category found (or specify hierarchy if we need to be more specific).

Got it. This seems like an overly verbose way to assign category mappings. All you really need to assign the mapping is the product and category id (bvin). The problem, of course, is that the bvin value isn't particularly user-friendly. We could use the SKU and the category bvin; that would be concise and a little easier.

The other question is whether the category mapping should be part of the main product import/export or if it should be a separate import/export like with your approach. Depending on the size of the catalog putting it all together could pose a performance problem, but it probably makes the most sense to a user.

This was used when the bvin was only 6 numerical characters - it has changed quite a bit.

Buell! You're speaking my language, Matt. Where's the Ducati section? :)