Overview
This article explains how to migrate your products to WooCommerce from another ecommerce platform such as Magento, Shopify or BigCommerce. It describes what information needs to match in order for your WooCommerce products to be connected to your products in Counterpoint using Modern Retail's Counterpoint integration. For the sake of simplicity, it assumes you know how to import products into WooCommerce. Please talk to your agency, developer or WooCommerce support if you need help importing products and images into WooCommerce.
Unique Identifier (UID)
As you might expect, every product and every product variation on your website is unique. This is how you can display shoes in multiple sizes and width and charge $2 more that XXL t-shirt. Each product and each product variation has a different unique identifier. We like to think of this UID as the "glue" that binds the product in Counterpoint to the product in WooCommerce.
I'm going to talk about these UIDs in a bit but let's first review of couple of different product types you'll find in Counterpoint and on your website.
Product Types
There are two different types of products addressed in this article:
- Non-Gridded Products
- Non-Gridded Products do not have variations like size, width or color. Instead, they are simple products with no options.
- Gridded Products
- Gridded Products have variations such as size, width and color. A typical example of a Gridded Product is a t-shirt. T-shirts come in various sizes (small, medium and large), as well as, colors (red, green and blue).
Each of these types of products needs to be handled slightly differently, which is explained below.
Non-Gridded Products
Connecting Non-Gridded Product from Counterpoint to those in WooCommerce is easy. You simply need to make sure the Counterpoint Item number matches the value in the WooCommerce SKU field. That's it!
Yes, Modern Retail's Counterpoint integration will automatically connect to these products when the Counterpoint Item number exactly matches the value in the WooCommerce SKU. When this happens, our integration will ONLY UPDATE THE FOLLOWING TWO FIELDS IN WOOCOMMERCE:
- Inventory
- Price or Sale Price
- We can turn off the updating of pricing if necessary.
Our integration will not touch any of the extra fields or data you have uploaded to WooCommerce include product name, description, categories, images, etc. Again, the integration will only touch the inventory and price, and will leave all other information untouched in WooCommerce!
Gridded Products
Connecting to Gridded Products that have been uploaded to WooCommerce takes a little more work but not terribly hard once you know what you're doing.
Below is a typical example of a Gridded Product, one that comes in multiple colors and sizes. Given this product comes in 4 colors and 6 sizes, there's a total of 24 variations of this product. Each of these variations must have a Unique ID in order for the product to be connected between Counterpoint and WooCommerce. Counterpoint does not natively create item numbers for each of these variations so Modern Retail's Integrator needs to do this work.
Fortunately, the Modern Retail Integrator has a built-in function that will export gridded products to a file. This Export Gridded Items to CSV feature can be found under the Functions menu and will be extremely helpful as you match up the Gridded Products from Counterpoint to those in WooCommerce.
Looking at the example above of the ADM-JACKET, you'll notice the export has a line item for each color and size. In Column A you'll find the UID, which is the unique identifier of that product variation we use in Counterpoint. This UID must exactly match the SKU for this same product variation in WooCommerce.
Just like for Non-Gridded Products, when the integration finds a matching value in the SKU field, it will ONLY UPDATE THE FOLLOWING TWO FIELDS IN WOOCOMMERCE:
- Inventory
- Price or Sale Price
- We can turn off the updating of pricing if necessary.
That's right, all the other data that you have in WooCommerce such as the product name, description, categories, images, etc. will not be touched by our integration!
Recommended Approach
The following is Modern Retail's recommend approach when you need to import your products into WooCommerce from another ecommerce platform:
- Buy Modern Retail's Counterpoint Integration.
- You can buy it online.
- Select a few new Non-Gridded and Gridded Products from Counterpoint to be added to your WooCommerce website.
- These should be NEW products that never existed on your website before and aren't being migrated from your old website.
- Let Modern Retail's integration create these products for you in WooCommerce, then take a look at these products in WooCommerce.
- It should become immediately apparent the values in WooCommerce's SKU field are being created.
- These examples of Non-Gridded and Gridded Products should give you a blueprint to follow for all the products that need to be imported from your old website.
- Import the catalog from your old website into WooCommerce, making sure you follow the required format for the SKU field for all Non-Gridded and Gridded Products.
- Many developers and agencies will import your catalog into WooCommerce as part of the project. Very often this makes sense given you are likely to make changes to structure and categorization from your old website to your new one. If you aren't working with a developer or agency, WooCommerce provides a myriad of articles on how to import products, as well as, customer support.
As part of Modern Retail's onboard process, we'll assign you a dedicated project manager who can answer any questions you may have regarding migrating your products to WooCommerce. Additionally, feel free to submit a support request in the Admin Panel, and someone will lend you a hand.