Many people use the popular 1ShoppingCart eCommerce and marketing software to sell digital products and/or physical products but adding those products into your WordPress website can be very tedious and error-prone.
Great News! You can now easily import your *simple* products hosted on 1ShoppingCart into WordPress. This method is free and does not require a developer.
A new built-in CSV importer was included in WooCommerce as of version 3.1.0 that was released on 2017-06-28. This is terrific news because you no longer need to purchase and install a premium Importer plugin to display your *simple* products in your WordPress site.
If your products are complex, with many product options, this method will NOT work for you because the built-in importer does not allow you to import all the product options that you are able to configure using 1ShoppingCart.com.
The WooCommerce’s built-in importer can be used to create all your products. Then you can use the importer again, at a later date, to update your products to reflect price and/or description changes. BUT, in order to update your products in WooCommerce, you need a way to uniquely identify the product. You can do this with a unique product name or SKU.
10 Steps to copy your 1ShoppingCart catalog to WooCommerce
Follow these simple steps to export your products from 1ShoppingCart, prepare the exported file for WooCommerce import and then import the file into WooCommerce.
- Install and configure WooCommerce.
If you need help installing and configuring WooCommerce on your WordPress site, you can follow the instructions published by WooCommerce at https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/installing-uninstalling-woocommerce/. - Export your products from 1ShoppingCart.
- Prepare your CSV file to import into WooCommerce.
The export created by 1ShoppingCart.com is not completely ready for import into WooCommerce. A few columns need to be added to the original CSV to ensure its easy import into WooCommerce. I used Google Sheets to manipulate the file. The formulas you find below are Google Sheets formulas but will also work with Excel. CAUTION: WooCommerce requires a UTF-8 formatted file. Excel for Mac will not produce a valid UTF-8 file and your import will fail. Please use Google Sheets instead.Your export from 1ShoppingCart.com contains 34 columns. You will be adding 5 more columns to the file.
Download sample CSV file with added columns here
Images: Take a look at your export. Notice that the 26th column contains the name of the product image but not the full path to the image file. You will need the full image path to import the file correctly into WooCommerce. The full path of the image includes your 1ShoppingCart.com Merchant Id. If you do not know your 1ShoppingCart.com Merchant Id, the image to the left shows you where to find it in your Admin panel.
Add a new column and label it Images. Insert this formula to the newly created column. The formula will preface the filename found in column Z with the “https://www.mcssl.com/content/” + your Merchant Id + “/”. Which will produce https://www.mcssl.com/content/000000000/my_image_file.jpg.=if(Z2="","","https://www.mcssl.com/content/MerchantID/"&Z2)
Please be sure to replace the text MerchantID with your own Merchant ID. For example, if your Merchant ID is 789665, you would enter the formula as –
=if(Z2="","","https://www.mcssl.com/content/789665/"&Z2)
Copy the formula down the column for each product row in the spreadsheet.
- Button Text: Add a new column and label it Button Text. You will fill this column with the words or phrase that you want to see on your WooCommerce buttons. This can be “Add to Cart,” “Buy Now,” etc.
Copy the formula down the column for each product row in the spreadsheet. - Type: Add a new column and label it Type. You will enter the word “external” into this column for each of the products that you are importing. Because you will be selling your products via 1ShoppingCart, you will need to let WooCommerce know that WooCommerce is only listing and describing the product, and the item will be sold elsewhere. Marking the product external ensures that the customer is taken to 1ShoppingCart.com to complete the transaction.
Copy the formula down the column for each product you want to import. - Published: The next column to add is Published. In the 25th column, you will see a field called Active. The column has the values TRUE/FALSE to denote that the product is an active product or not. WooCommerce does not have an Active field but it does have a Published field. The Published field requires a 1 to Publish or a 0 for Draft. Therefore, this next formula will convert the TRUE or FALSE in column 25 to a 1 or 0. Enter the following formula –
=if(Y2,1,0)
Copy the formula down the column for each product row in the spreadsheet.
- Categories: If you look at the 27th column of your spreadsheet, you will see the field called “path.” This field contains the product category(ies). If the product falls into multiple categories, you will see that the data in this column appears in this format – [Grocery,Beverage]. Notice that the multiple categories are surrounded by square brackets ( [ ] ). If you were to import this column as is into WooCommerce, it would create category names with those square brackets in them. The formula in this new column will remove those square brackets if they are present in the data. Enter the following formula in the new column.
=if(AA2="","",SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(AA2,"[",""),"]",""))
Copy the formula down the column for each product row in the spreadsheet.
- Download the Google Sheets file to your device as a CSV file.
This is important. You must download the Google Sheets file in CSV format. - Open WooCommerce in WordPress
- Navigate to Products | All Products in your WordPress Admin panel.
If there are no products in WooCommerce, you will see two buttons at the bottom of the page. Click/Tap on the “Import products from a CSV file” button.
If you already have a product in WooCommerce, look at the top of the page and click/tap the “Import” button.
- Select the file to import into WooCommerce
- Map CSV fields to products
Here you will map the fields in your 1ShoppingCart.com export to WooCommerce fields. I have listed the column mapping below but if you would like to see the page as rendered in WooCommerce, click/tap here.1ShoppingCart Fields WooCommerce Fields id import as meta sku SKU product Name price Regular price shipping Do not import weight Weight (lbs) product length Length (in) product width Width (in) product height Height (in) current inventory Stock recurring cycle Do not import recurring start duration Do not import recurring price Do not import destination url Do not import thank you url Do not import clear cart url Do not import autoresponders Do not import shipping calculation Do not import state tax Do not import country tax Do not import short description Short description long description Description sale price Sale price on sale Do not import active Do not import image Do not import path Do not import price type Do not import amount label Do not import default price Do not import minimum amount Do not import maximum amount Do not import eu vat Do not import add to cart url External URL Images Images Button Text Button text Type Type Published Published Categories Categories - Click/Tap the “Run the importer” button
- View results
If the importer finds problems with the file, you will see a link on the results page to the log file that will detail the issues with the file. Correct those errors and re-import the file.
- Review your products for completeness