Product Information Management

This is a topic that comes up quite a lot.

Here is the scenario:

• You have a Magento store
• You have a development version of the store
• You have a reasonably large number of products to manage

And you have a load of changes that need making.

Perhaps a new range of products, or some other sweeping changes to your existing products. Perhaps you need to add translations for your new German store...

So the question is how do you do this?

You really don't believe in doing things directly on the live site, so you need to be able to test and develop your changes on your development site before you then apply the changes to live.

Manually Editing In Magento

Your first option is to manually edit all your products on staging, and then repeat that process on live.

Manually Editing is Bad Because..

• It's hugely time consuming
• It's error prone

Uploading CSV Files to Magento

Getting better - you now have a set of data that you can work on and repeatedly upload to your development environment until you get it right.

You will need to make sure that you re-sync your development database with your live site database to ensure that your uploads are a proper test of exactly how it will work when you come to do the upload on live.

Once you have your file perfected, you can upload to live with the confidence that it will turn out exactly as your tests have shown.

Tips

• Don't use Excel to work on CSV data
• Google sheets might be an option unless there is a lot of data
• Open/Libre office is a good option for working on the desktop, but make sure you backup your work regularly!

Uploading CSV Files is Bad Because..

• The standard Magento upload system is not fully featured. There are lots of things that can be done in the Magento admin but can not be done via the upload
• Working with CSV files can be really, hugely painful. I really recommend avoiding Excel like the plague - it's too clever for it's own good.

Using MAGMI to Import CSV Files to Magento

MAGMI (Magento Mass Importer) is a widely used third party codebase that will allow you upload CSV files into a Magento store

MAGMI supports many more standard Magento product features and is generally a much more powerful option

Tips

• See CSV Tips
• Make absolutely sure that MAGMI is properly secured and locked down. It is insecure by default and due to it's nature, a malcious actor could wreak havoc if they gain access to your MAGMI.

Uploading CSV Files to MAGMI is Bad Because..

• MAGMI can be buggy, especially if you have a heavily customised Magento
• You still have all the pain of working with CSV files

Using Akeneo to Manage Product Information

So this brings us to the most advanced option, using a dedicated PIM (product information management) system such as Akeneo to manage your product information

This is a purpose built and dedicated tool that has only one job - to manage product information. And it does that really well.

There are a huge number of benefits to moving to this kind of tool, such as:

• Better security - access to the live store can be limited and there is no need for product data workers to have any access to the store
• Better performance - by offloading this work to a dedicated tool, we have the ability to host it elsewhere - well away from the live store. The Magento admin in contrast is a very resource hungry beast and by using it, you are impacting the performance of your store front.
• No Data Silo - your product data is now properly decoupled from your e-commerce store. Should you ever decide to move away from Magento, you just need an Akeneo connector to your platform of choice.
• Other Channels - now your data is separated, you can use it for things like printed brochures. There are some great plugins for example that will connect Akeneo with Adobe Indesign
• Existing Extensions and Integrations - There are a wealth of existing connectors and extensions for Akeneo allowing you to manage product data enrichment and exporting in the most efficient and flexible way possible.

Conclusion

So in conclusion - don't do large scale product data management using the Magento admin. At the very least work with CSV files and properly test your data in a development or staging environment.

If you really want to do it properly though, it's time to look into a proper PIM solution such as Akeneo

Of course, you need to get the services of an Expert PHP Development Agency to help you get this all properly set up..

Talk to Edmonds Commerce today!

Cheers

Joseph