Importing Products into Volusion

I'll give credit where credit is due.  Volusion has some good features, such as the ability to import product data from Excel.  Of course, they have to add their own "Volusion Sucks" spin on a great idea, so it doesn't really work like one would hope or need.

For instance, you can export your entire database to CSV for manipulation in Excel all in one fell swoop. Try re-importing the same or modified file, though, and you'll get hung up if you attempt to import more than about 1000 product items with all of the fields in the file. If you're just doing a pricing update, you probably can import about 5000 items at a time.

Of course, if you're trying to import too many items, Volusion won't tell you that there are too many items.  It'll simply time out and you'll be left wondering if the items are importing or not.  After about an hour, you can trash the browser history, close the browser, log in, cut the import file down in size and try again.

Then there's field names for the various fields. In the Products page of the back office, there's a little blue ? image next to each field. Clicking on that ? logo will open up a little pop-up screen that shows you the amount of data that each field can contain, the field type (long, for instance, to denote a long integer, meaning up to 255 characters for those non-programmer types) and a description.  There's even a link on the bottom that you can expand to get the field name in the database, such as:

[Exact Fieldname in Database: Fixed_ShippingCost]

This annotation is really handy when working in Excel to get the exact field names needed for the import. But of course, in fine Volusion form, even the field names are often screwed up. The pop-ups for some fields don't work, for others, there is no field name, and for even more, such as the Categories field, the information is wrong. You have to hunt around a bit to learn that they've changed the field for Categories from "ProductCategory" to "CategoryIDs."

Of course, I don't see anywhere that this change is notated in the LOKB™ (referring to Volusion's Lack-Of-Knowledge-Base).  You just have to know and remember that change is in place when you do an import or you'll get an error on import.

Good luck with all that...