Importing Products From Another WooCommerce Store

In this guide, I would like to talk about different ways how, in WooCommerce, to import products from another website. Specifically, we will take a look at two different approaches:

1. using standard WooCommerce import and export tools,
2. and using a plugin for that.

More than that, if you’re using a WooCommerce Multisite installation – in other words, your stores are a part of a single WordPress Multisite network, then a couple of more moments you will need to keep in mind as well, and we will uncover them in this tutorial later.

Using Standard Import and Export Tools

The whole process of using the standard WooCommerce import and export tools is pretty straightforward. You can find the buttons “Import” and “Export” on the “All Products” page in the WooCommerce admin dashboard:

Basically, all you need to do is use the export tool on your initial website to export the products as a CSV file, and then you can upload this file using the import tool on the target site.

Let’s uncover this process step by step.

1. Export WooCommerce products from another site or use a ready CSV file

Once you click the “Export” button from the “All products” page, the following export tool will appear:

On this page, you can decide:

• Which specific product data should be included in the export file, for example, you may not need to export “GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN”, “Stock Status”, “Stock Quantity”, and maybe some other fields. If your store has thousands of products, it will make a huge impact on the size of the export file.
• What product types to export, for example, I decided to export only simple products and variable products in my example.
• Last but not least, if you’re using custom fields for WooCommerce products, you can also include them in the export file.

As an option, you can use an example CSV export file that comes with WooCommerce; you can find it in the woocommerce/sample-data folder, or you can download it straight from the official GitHub repository, here.

2. Import products from a CSV file

Great, now we have our CSV export file, and what we need to do is open another website and go straight to the “Import” tool.

There are also multiple options available, some of which are hidden under the “Show advanced options” link.

Let’s take a quick look at them:

• If you check the “Update existing products” checkbox, then new products are not going to be imported; only existing ones (with the same ID or SKU) will be updated on the current store.
• The “CSV Delimiter” option allows you to import custom CSV files, which weren’t created by WooCommerce (like we did before). For example, you may need to change the value of this option from , to ;.
• On the next page, the WooCommerce product import tool will ask you whether you decide to skip importing some specific product data or reassign the columns. The “Use previous column mapping” checkbox allows you to use the previously used configuration.

That’s pretty much it. However, if you’re doing it between subsites of your WordPress multisite network, continue to the next chapter.

Want to sync products between stores automatically without doing this whole export-import process every time? Then you need the plugin approach below.

Importing products to a sub-site in a Multisite Network

Luckily, there are not many things we need to do when we are using a product import tool within a WordPress multisite network. The thing is that when trying to run the import, we may face the following error:

To fix this error, we need to visit the Settings > Network Settings page from the network admin dashboard and then scroll down to the “Upload Settings” section.

We need to make sure that CSV file types are allowed:

That’s pretty much it.

Now you can go to any sub-store of your multisite network and perform the import.

But the question is – can we perform the product import:

• for specific products only,
• or every time a product gets updated on the main store?

The answer is “yes”, but in that case, we will need to use a plugin for that, since WooCommerce itself doesn’t have this functionality by default.

Using a Plugin

Now, let’s talk about the plugin approach. There are two different plugins that will allow you to configure WooCommerce product import from another website:

• Simple Multisite Crossposting – if your stores are a part of a single multisite network,
• Simple WordPress Crossposting – if you’re using standalone WooCommerce stores.

The whole idea here comes down to two simple steps.

First, you need to connect stores (or just make sure that the stores are allowed for the product import if you’re using the multisite version of the plugin).

Second, when editing a specific WooCommerce product, just select stores where you’d like to import this particular product:

Or, you can import multiple products using the bulk actions:

Guys, if you have any questions about specific cases of performing WooCommerce product import, please feel free to ask them in the comments below.

# Multisite, WooCommerce