If you run a WooCommerce store and want to add a large number of products to your store, it can be time-consuming and tedious because of repeating the same steps for hundreds of thousands of products.
Well, you don’t need to worry because WooCommerce provides you with the solution.
You can import the product file to your WooCommerce store, and you are good to go. You can import any product with its images, whether they are simple, variable, or grouped products.
Many tutorials are available online to help you do so, but you will need to use a free or paid third-party plugin to follow along with that tutorial.
But In today’s article, I’ll walk you through the step-by-step process to import variable products in WooCommerce with images without using any plugin or code. You can do this from within the WooCommerce-provided options.
You will need a CSV file for your products with the required WooCommerce columns to import products to your store.
So before jumping into the tutorial, let’s understand the CSV file and learn about the required WooCommerce columns.
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What is a CSV File?
A comma-separated value, or CSV, is a text file (or, in this case, a spreadsheet) that contains tabular data separated by commas. When you import this file into WordPress, it will be sorted and converted into individual products based on its information.
How to Create a CSV File?
To follow this tutorial, you will need to create a CSV file. So let’s create it. Just follow the following steps.
- The first step is to open Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel and make a new XLSX file.
- Give a title to each column in the product data import spreadsheet. For example, name, SKU, price, product categories, description, etc.
- Because we want to import only those WooCommerce products that have images, the Images column is essential. You should include the image’s URL in the Images column.
The standard procedure is to upload all product images to the WordPress media library and enter the corresponding URLs into the image field. - Create a comma-separated list of image URLs to upload multiple images to a product (this is impossible for product variations).
- Once everything is done, save the file as CSV.
Following is the example product CSV file that I’ll be using for this tutorial. Here is the link to the Sample WooCommerce Product Sheet so that you can view the required columns.
Now that we have created the product CSV file, let’s import it to the store.
How to Import Variable Products in WooCommerce with Images?
As I mentioned above, you don’t need to download and install any plugin to your store to import the products. You can follow the following steps to achieve your desired goals.
The first step you need to do is to navigate to Products » All Products from your WordPress admin dashboard.
2. Click the Import Button
Once in the product section, click the ‘Start Import’ button to import the products.
Note: If you already have some products in your store, then instead of the above screen, you’ll see the following screen, and you need to click the ‘Import’ button to import the products from a CSV file.
3. Upload the CSV File
Once you click the import button, you’ll be redirected to the product importer, where you can upload the CSV product sheet from your computer to import the products with images to your WooCommerce store.
To upload the CSV file, click the ‘Choose File’ button.
Note: If your file size exceeds the maximum file upload size, you need to increase the maximum file upload size.
You can contact your hosting provider or do it from the Cpanel to increase it. You can also increase it by using a custom code.
4. Start the Importer
Once you have selected the file, click the ‘Continue’ button to start the importer. If you have the products in the sheet that is already in your store, you can check the ‘Update Existing Products’ checkbox.
This will match the ID or SKU, and the products with the same ID or SKU will be skipped.
5. Map CSV Fields to Products
In the next step, you need to map the CSV sheet columns to the WooCommerce products. Select fields from your CSV file to map against product fields or to ignore during import.
6. Run the Importer
After that, click the ‘Run the Importer’ button to import all the products in the CSV sheet to your WooCommerce store.
Once you click it, importing will start. Depending on the number of products in the CSV file, importing the products with images will take a few minutes.
You’ll see the following screen once all the products in the sheet are added to your WooCommerce store.
7. Final Results
To view the products, click the ‘View’ button, or you can also navigate to Products » All Products from your WordPress admin dashboard.
You’ll see all the products that were on the sheet. If you have set the products in the sheet as ‘Published (1)’, they will be published in the store.
And the products that you set as ‘Draft (0)’ will be drafted in the store.
Once you visit the product section, you’ll notice that all the products have been imported successfully.
You can also check the products to see if everything has been imported correctly. I tested one of the variable products, and as shown in the screenshot below, all the variations and images are successfully imported to my store.
Wrapping Up
That’s it for today’s article.
I hope this article was helpful to you and you were able to import the variable products in WooCommerce with images without using any third-party plugin. If you have any questions, you can ask them in the comments.
I would love to answer all your questions.
