Importing products into WooCommerce: how to move a catalogue from Excel safely
Every company that moves from paper or Excel spreadsheets to an online store sooner or later faces the same question: how to move hundreds or thousands of products into WooCommerce without losing data accuracy? At CREATING.LV we have carried out this process repeatedly — including in projects with around 1,500 products, several data sources and mismatched categories. In this article we summarise a practical approach to importing products into WooCommerce.
Why a “simple” import is rarely as simple as it seems
WooCommerce offers a built-in CSV import tool, and many people think it is enough to prepare a file and upload it. In practice, problems arise because real data often comes from several sources — a supplier’s Excel spreadsheet, an export from a previous online store and an internal inventory file — and they rarely match completely. Typical mismatches:
- The same brands or categories written differently (for example, “Rational” vs “RATIONAL” vs an empty field)
- Prices given with or without VAT, in different currencies or formats
- Product SKUs/item codes that partly match between files and partly do not
- Missing images or image links that are no longer valid
- Duplicate records with small differences in the name
Step 1: a data audit before import
Before creating any import file, you need to compare all available data sources in one place — usually with Excel/Google Sheets or, for larger volumes, with a scripted solution (for example, Python and the pandas library) that can automatically identify:
- Products that are in one source but missing from another
- Category and brand mismatches
- Price or quantity anomalies
- Duplicates by item number or similar name
This step usually takes more time than the import itself, but it is what determines whether the end result is a reliable catalogue or chaos with hundreds of errors to fix manually.
Step 2: aligning the structure with WooCommerce logic
WooCommerce expects a certain data structure — product categories and attributes (for example, size, colour, material) should be prepared before the import, rather than fixed afterwards for each product separately. If an online store has several thousand products, poor planning of the attribute and category hierarchy later means rearranging hundreds of products at once, which is time-consuming and risky.
Step 3: import in batches, not in one go
For large catalogues (500+ products), it is advisable to import gradually — before uploading the whole catalogue, import a small sample (20–50 products), check the result on the front end and in the admin panel, and only then continue with the full volume. This lets you spot formatting errors in time, before they affect the whole catalogue.
Step 4: checking images and SEO data
An often forgotten but important step — making sure each product has:
- A valid image link (not just a file that existed in the old system)
- A unique and descriptive product name (not just an item number)
- An SEO-friendly URL (slug), especially if the products will be indexed in Google Shopping results
Step 5: post-import check
After the full import, a control check needs to be carried out — compare the number of products in the import file with the number of products in WooCommerce, and spot-check prices, stock quantities and category assignments. Automated comparison scripts are especially useful here, as they can check thousands of products in a few minutes rather than browsing each record manually.
When it is better to leave the import to professionals
If the catalogue has more than a few hundred products, the data comes from several sources with different structures, or regular (rather than one-off) synchronisation with supplier systems is needed, a manual Excel-to-WooCommerce process becomes inefficient and error-prone. CREATING.LV builds custom import and comparison solutions that let even large catalogues (1,000+ products) be moved accurately and with full data traceability.
Summary
A successful product import into WooCommerce starts not with an import plugin but with a careful data audit and structure alignment. By investing time in preparation, you can avoid hundreds of manual fixes after the import and make sure the online store works with accurate, well-organised data from day one.