Product Imports - Never Works

[teamLA]

When will the product importing functionality improve?

I've NEVER successfully imported without an issue being escalated in support.  

What does Invalid Product Import Status mean

[Moderator-Davis]

Hey there @teamLA, 

I was glad to see that you have already started a support ticket about this behavior. We definitely want to help check into this directly. 

With that in mind, our wonderful community here is full of brilliant shippers like yourself! I would encourage anyone that has run into this type of product importing error message to share how they worked around it. 

My tip, if it has not been done already, would be to check for any sort of "special characters" that can sometimes trip up an import i've seen. I'm not sure if that is the case here, but thats always been my first step of troubleshooting. Additionally, if you are seeing an error on a particular line, see if removing that line allows you to upload the rest of the sheet and then add that product individually potentially? I know thats not an ideal solution, but maybe a band-aid for the time being. 

Be on the lookout at that email chain from our support team soon 🙂 

[teamLA]

Can you guys bring in or acquire a company to solve this problem.  

Suggestions: "CSV importing made easy"

csvbox , Flatfile ,  oneschema,  usecsv 

I've been using Shipstation since 2016 and there was 1 "major" update.

Product importing has not changed, in terms of functionality or additional features. 

For an account with over 20,000 skus on 3 marketplaces, Shipstation has been the weakest link for operations.

- Bulk Merge / bulk combine

- Bulk delete, to work all the time.  (No one has answered or fixed in 2 years)

- Descriptive errors / error codes

- Product Tags to be separate from Order Tags

[shipstation10]

I agree 100% there definitely needs to be some major updates in regards to the import process.

Your bullet points are spot on, I would add a "Import Progress" portal as well.  

There should be an "Import Progress" option under the import menu that give us a tally of the items importing so we can know when it's finished and we can check.
I have over 50,000 skus.  

I do all my work in Excel, but the solution I've found to work (90% of the time at least) is to save my import file as a csv from Excel, then upload it to Google Drive.  Don't edit it, once it's open just download it as a csv from Google Drive.

I then import the file downloaded from Google Drive.

Don't ask me why it works.

But more often than not, the excel file would throw dumb errors, like the ones you mentioned.

The Google Drive csv just works.

[Moderator-Davis]

@shipstation10, 

Thanks so much for sharing a method that has worked for you! The collective wealth of knowledge is tremendous in the community! 

If this method is attempted and the error messages persist, please present those details on your support ticket as well! Any and all information about a matter helps! 🙂 

Happy Friday! 

[teamLA]

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@Moderator-Davis wrote:

If this method is attempted and the error messages persist, please present those details on your support ticket as well! Any and all information about a matter helps!  

As I said, I wouldn't publicly make a scene and be a Karen without reason.  You're pawning off this situation, just like all chat support, pawning me off to the "escalation team." 

[Moderator-Davis]

@teamLA, 

I definitely understand the frustration you're describing, but in truth, I'm just wanting to get you directly with the team that is doing the investigating into the issue. I am here to help in the community, and happy to do so, but speaking with support is your only option when it comes to resolving direct technical issues. I can see that our team is attempting to ask you some questions to help narrow down the scope of this investigation, and without those direct answers, it can be difficult to move forward. I assure you, we both want to see this issue resolved, so that you can go back to shipping as normal. 

I promise, i'm not trying to pawn you off on another department, I want to have the investigation be where it belongs, in the hands of the team with the tools to help. I mean that sincerely. If you do decided to take those steps listed, and still find troubles in your import, please feel free to reach out to my DM and we will see what can be done next. 

[teamLA]

@shipstation10 Thank you for your reply..  Unfortunately, I also use this useless workaround.. even so, it doesn't work

[JMD]

I have issues with this all the time and it is BEYOND frustrating. When we want to launch product and there is no more live support that the issue can be addressed right away is such a flaw. I was told in a live chat 'you get a generic error so we can help you - we see in the back end why the error has occurred' why would the HIDE that information from us. My issue was pretty straight forward once the next business day I went into a live chat to ask about it, but the problem was I wasn't given that information up front and instead get this generic message that tells me nothing!  

[mschmoyer1]

Hey all, my name is Mike from ShipStation engineering. We are currently testing a new version of the product import which should help address some of the issues above. Namely, it has a "matching" component that lets you map ANY field names to the appropriate fields in ShipStation. It also has more verbose errors and warnings and is much less likely to throw up "an unexpected error" as @JMD pointed out above. 

This will roll out slowly to ensure quality but if anyone wants access to the new version please reply or DM me!