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Migrating Counterpoint Products to Magento

Overview

This article explains how to migrate your products to Magento from another ecommerce platform such as Shopify, BigCommerce or WooCommerce.  It describes what information needs to match in order for your Magento 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 Magento.  Please talk to your agency, developer or Magento support if you need help importing products and images into Magento.

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 widths and charge $2 more for 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 Magento.

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:

  1. Non-Gridded Products
    • Non-Gridded Products do not have variations like size, width, or color.  Instead, they are simple products with no options.
  2. 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, as explained below.

Non-Gridded Products

Connecting Non-Gridded Products from Counterpoint to those in Magento is easy.  You only need to make sure the Counterpoint Item number matches the value in the Magento SKU field.  

Modern Retail's Counterpoint integration will automatically connect to these products when the Counterpoint Item number exactly matches the value in the Magento SKU.  When this happens, our integration will only update the following two values in Magento:

  1. Inventory
  2. 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 Magento including product name, description, categories, images, etc.  

INVENTORY-ITEM-SCARF.PNG

Gridded Products

Connecting to Gridded Products that have been uploaded to Magento takes a little more work, but is 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 Magento.  Counterpoint does not natively create item numbers for each of these variations, so Modern Retail's Integrator needs to do this work.

CounterPoint-Gridded-Product-Example.PNG

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 Magento.

Export-CounterPoint-Gridded-Items-Menu-Option.png

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 Magento.

Export-CounterPoint-Gridded-Items.png

Just like for Non-Gridded Products, when the integration finds a matching value in the SKU field, it will only update the following fields in Magento:

  1. Inventory
  2. 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 Magento 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 Magento from another ecommerce platform:

  1. Buy Modern Retail's Counterpoint Integration.
  2. Select a few new Non-Gridded and Gridded Products from Counterpoint to be added to your Magento website. 
    • These should be new products that never existed on your website before, and aren't being migrated from your old website.
  3. Let Modern Retail's integration create these products for you in Magento, then take a look at these products in Magento.
    • It should become immediately apparent if the values in Magento'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.
  4. Import the catalog from your old website into Magento, 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 Magento 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, Magento provides a myriad of articles on how to import products, as well as customer support.

As part of Modern Retail's onboarding process, we'll assign you a dedicated project manager who can answer any questions you may have regarding migrating your products to Magento.  Additionally, feel free to submit a support request in the Admin Panel, and someone will lend you a hand.