Importing the feed into WooCommerce or Shopify

Pick the right file first

WooCommerce: the woocommerce file. Shopify: the shopify file — or its numbered parts if you import by hand, because the Shopify upload box stops at 15 MB.

Any other system: the Dropply CSV, which carries one field per column. Google Shopping: the XML.

Use the small file for the nightly update

For a scheduled update take the stock-and-price file rather than the full feed. It is 195 kB instead of 24 MB and imports in minutes rather than hours.

The full feed is for the first import and for when texts or images change. Pulling 24 MB every night to move a few stock figures is work for both of us and gains nothing.

Three things that look like errors

Shopify runs a single import job per store. Start the next part before the previous one has finished and you are told an import job is already in progress — which reads like a problem with your file, and is not.

It takes longer than you expect: 2 432 products with images took over 35 minutes in our test store, with no progress bar. You can close the dialog and keep working.

Images arrive after the products, so a product can sit with a broken thumbnail for a while. Judge the images an hour after the import, not during it.

And one that really is an error

Shopify's product CSV has no currency column. Our prices are in euro and land as plain numbers in whatever currency your store is set to. If that is not euro, change it before you import.