Bulk Imports and Bulk Updating store lists are two of the most common areas where we have been asked to provide support or guidance. We’ve listened to your comments and suggestions in this area to bring you some improvements to make this process simpler, more reliable and more intuitive to use.

The major change that we’ve introduced is an Import Preview page. This is shown before your store list is updated so you have the chance to review what changes are about to be made. This means you can catch problems such as the address information being incorrectly imported before you confirm whether you would like the import to go ahead.

Next up, we have a new ‘Delete on Import’ switch which will automatically delete your old store list prior to importing. This avoids one of the problems that you’ve reported where the import file upload fails but you’d already deleted your old store list. In this case, the deletion and import happen only after you’ve previewed the import to check everything has come in OK.

Finally, we’ve added a ‘Detect Duplicates’ feature which will detect duplicate store addresses in your import file and omit them from the import. This means you can take your existing import file and add extra stores to it then reimport without needing to worry about removing the stores from the file that had been imported previously.

We’ve recently added two new support articles to our database which we highly recommend reading if you want further detail on the best practice for bulk imports / updates to your store lists.

Support Article: Using the Bulk Export / Import features to make bulk changes to your location list

Support Article: Bulk Importing Store Data

Coming soon we have a video which will walk you through the process of performing a bulk store import. We’ll post a blog entry once this is available.