Importing & Exporting Data Using Spreadsheets or CSV

Creating an application that integrates using a REST API can be expensive & complicated. If you are not needing a "live" sync, sometimes it is just easier to manually import or export data using spreadsheets. Many customers use this for initial product imports, maintaining pricing for large lists of products, and for many other uses.

Zeald's system provides comprehensive importer & exporter tools to use spreadsheets to (manually) import/export:

• Customers
• Products (including pricing tiers/currency, inventory, promotions, attributes)
• Orders

So if, for example, you were wanting to allow data to be exported from your system into ZEST, you may simply be able to match the field names/format of these spreadsheets and provide an "Export to ZEST Website Product File" option in your system. For documentation on this, see our customer help site

Advanced use

For more advanced users, we provide spreadsheet import/export to any resource available in the Data API. The easiest way to get a link to the importer or exporter is to visit the documentation page for a given resource & use the link provided at the bottom of that page.

Please keep in mind that most resources are just going to give a fairly raw view of the data. So column names and the format of data in the rows & columns may not be the most user friendly.

If looking to import data take note that while the column names can be manually mapped in the import process, the format of these cells can be critical to enable the website to work properly. A bad import can very quickly destroy the product data & require a full restore to recover the site. See our customer documentation on cleaning up after a bad import if you find yourself in this situation.

The easiest way to avoid this situation is to simply not import any fields you are not requiring. Any fields not mapped for a resource when importing a spreadsheet will not be set (or modified when editing a record).

Automatic spreadsheet import / export

We don't provide the ability to access the API using CSV or spreadsheet format, or the ability upload spreadsheets automatically/programatically.

If you have a clear requirement to do so (e.g. your software already outputs CSV that you want automatically imported into a website), we can produce software to do so. However if you are building fuctionality, you are generally better off to interact directly with the Data API.