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> Creating / Editing Store Lists > Using the Bulk Export / Import features to make bulk changes to your location listUsing the Bulk Export / Import features to make bulk changes to your location list
This article will tell you how to make bulk updates to your existing list of stores in Store Locator Pro. This allows you to avoid having to manually edit or delete stores through the admin console and instead make changes in a spreadsheet and upload them directly to our system. You can use this process to quickly make a changes to all of your stores, or perhaps add some new stores or delete some stores.
The first step is to download your existing store list by clicking on the Bulk Export button from your stores page and open it up in your favorite spreadsheet editor.
Adding new stores to your store list
Take the store list you downloaded and paste the details for these new stores into the spreadsheet, making sure that the columns are in the right place. Remember, you should either put the complete address in the AddressComplete field or use the individual address components shown here.
When you're ready to do the import you’ll see two switches:
The first one is labelled Delete old location list before importing. If this switch is set to On, your existing list of locations will be deleted before your new list is imported. You should set this to on if you are replacing your entire existing list of stores with a freshly uploaded list. For example, you deleted a bunch of stores or made bulk changes to a bunch of stores and you want to refresh the whole list. In this case, we'll leave this button off because we are adding three new locations so you want to have the existing store list remain as is.
The second switch is labelled Ignore duplicate locations in import file. If this switch is set to On the importer will try to identify any duplicate locations in your import file by comparing the addresses with those locations that are already in your store list. Any duplicate addresses will be excluded from the import process. This switch is used if you have just added an extra few stores to your store list and are re-importing your list of stores. So, this is exactly what you should be doing in this case.
A good question at this point is when do I use each switch? Here’s the guideline:
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If you are just uploading new store entries are you aren’t worried about duplicate stores, leave both switches Off.
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Otherwise, if you are uploading new store entries but there could be duplicates already in your list of stores, set the Duplicate detection switch to On.
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If you are making changes to lots of existing stores or have deleted stores from the list, set Delete on Import to On to replace your list.
Making bulk updates to stores or deleting stores
If you are making a change to a number of stores such as setting store opening times across your store list or deleting stores, in this case you should make the changes in the exported spreadsheet as before.
In this case, you shouldn’t select ‘Detect Duplicates’ for two reasons. Firstly, it wouldn’t delete from the database the stores that we had deleted from our store list. Secondly, the duplicate detection works off the Store Address, so it will ignore any stores where the address is the same where in fact we want to update the store opening times. So, you should set it to Delete on Import which will replace the store list completely with the new upload file.
Now if things go horribly wrong somewhere and you’re starting to panic, you do have the option to click on the Restore button at this point. This will immediately take your store list back to how it was at 1 o’clock this morning EST. This is a great recovery option to get your locator back to how it was.