Importing products from a feed

An import feed points at a supplier’s XML feed or a CSV file and brings those products into your catalogue. The admin describes it exactly that way: “Pull products into your catalog from a supplier XML feed or a bulk CSV upload.”

The three things an import is made of

A source. The address of the supplier’s XML feed, or the CSV you upload. This is the only part that belongs to someone else, and it is the part most likely to change without telling you.

A mapping. Their columns, matched to your catalogue’s fields. This is the real work. A supplier calls a field art_no and you call it SKU; nothing can be imported until something says those are the same thing. Mapping is stored with the feed, so you do it once rather than every run.

A run. Applying the mapping to the source and writing the result into your catalogue.

Preview before you run

An import writes into the catalogue that your shoppers see. The preview exists so that the first time you find out a price column was actually a cost column is before it is live and not after.

Treat the preview as the point of the exercise rather than a formality — it is the only step where a mapping mistake is still cheap.

Imports are a standing relationship, not a one-off

A supplier feed changes: they add a column, rename one, restructure their categories. Your mapping was correct against the feed as it was the day you built it. Nothing in the mapping knows the feed has moved.

The practical habit: when a supplier tells you they have “updated their feed”, that is a prompt to re-check the mapping, not just to run the import again.

What this page does not say

• It does not give click-paths. This screen has no verified screenshot in this help centre.
• It does not specify a required CSV layout. The mapping step exists precisely so that there is no single required layout; what matters is that every field you need has a source.
• It does not say how often a feed runs, or what happens to products that disappear from the supplier’s feed. Both are real questions and neither has been checked against the current screen, so neither is answered here rather than guessed.