If you own an e-commerce store and have more than a few hundred products then you will soon be faced with a dilemma; who and when exactly will all the products be entered in to my e-commerce shop!?

As an analysis, a typist with a typing speed of 65 words per minute, will complete on average around 100 products per day (taking into account file naming, image cropping, writing a short product description, as well as text and content formatting).

Therefore if you have say 5,000 products, then in order to get these online correctly and in a professional effective manner, will take 5000 / 100 = 50 days, or nearly 2 months.

And don’t forget, that’s a 65WPM typist; you’re average Joe would do around a 1/3 of these (hence it would take around 150 days or 6 months to upload or insert all your products).

So clearly a method is needed in order to automate this process based on say a product list (as a .CSV file aka comma delimited text file).

Your products.CSV file:

The purpose of your .csv file is store the products information in order that it can be put into your e-commerce database. Obviously you would this to be created dynamically, but a static file will also do just fine (especially if you want to update multiple databases with the same ‘dataset’).

So create this file, making a note of which fields contain which data, eg field[1] has product_id code, etc. That’s this step complete now.

Automated Upload Code
The last thing we need to do is read the file and then insert the product information as products into our e-commerce store autonomously. In order to do this you will need to first find out which db fields are expected, both in terms of names, size and type, and order.

Once we have these we can then just read our products.csv file into a PHP array, and then loop through writing each product at a time; please note that in 99% of all cases this equates to creating new records in more than one database table. Normally you will need to add the product, product description, as well as any other related tables.

Data Dictionary & ER Diagram

Clearly in order to perform the above you will need access to your e-commerce store’s data diagram or ER diagram so that you can see how each table is related to another within the database. One of the quickest way in order to get this is to use the data dictionary function within PHPMySQL

So the 2 steps above logically layout how you can automate your product uploads in to your e-commerce store. At a later date we will write a specific version of this tutorial, with code and files, for both Magento and OSCommerce as this is something that we have lately completed successfully.