Can I use Dataflow Advanced Profiles to update products in categories?

[wenabar]

We're in the process of updating our Magento store. We're making major changes to the categories, renaming categories, and adding new categories and subcategories. We have a large database of products, and this means that the products will be reassigned to the new category and subcategory structure. I have pulled reports from our ERP system with the product sku's for each category and subcategory in the new store. (Did not pull products from Magento)

My question is, can I use a Dataflow Advanced Profiles to import the spread sheets with the product sku's and assign all the sku's for each import to the new category? We have a lot of Grouped products in the store, If this works, will I need to do a separate import for the grouped sku's?

I want to avoid doing this manually as we have 3 separate stores. Any suggestions you have to offer would be greatly appreciated.

Current Live store front: Magento Community Edition 1.7.02

New/Updated store in development: Magento Community Edition 1.9.11

[Brent W Peterson]

Yes you can do this, but you should be careful to only update the products that you want updated. Do not leave products on your list that don't need updating as you can change the inventory values by accident.

You may also want to consider a tool like MAGMI to have an easier way of updating your products.

Finally, this extension will work on your store in real time 

https://www.cobby.io/

It will allow you to update your products in a spreadsheet without having the hassle of doing uploads and downloads

[wenabar]

Hi Brent,

Thanks for the reply. Good to know...so I guess I'll do a test on a small batch of products. Many of the products will be in multiple categories, so my approach will be to update one category at a time.

Thanks for the tool recommendations. At a quick glance, they each look pretty good and could definitely save time. Cobby looks more stable than Magmi based on reviews and other info on the website.

Wendy

[raylenci1]

Brent,

I noticed your comment about inventory levels changing and figured you understand the Dataflow Profile mess of Magento really well.

I'm looking for a little help. This is what is happening:

I was using a DataFlow Profile for exporting existing skus, but only with specific fields/columns.

Opened the file in MSFT Excel as csv, I'd make my changes, save as csv file in Excel. When saving it asks Yes or No in saving "compatible features". I click YES

To Import, I did not use a specific Dataflow profile.....I simply used the Import feature

In the Import features, I chose "replace existing complex data" for the import behavior

What is happening upon import is other data fields are being affected, specifically our inventory levels of the imported skus

I don't understand why it affects those data fields in the database if the file only contained the field columns from the original "export sku" dataflow profile. Can you please tell me either what I'm doing wrong or what I'm missing here?

Thank you very much