03Changes
Bulk catalog update (Excel/CSV)
Update the whole catalog and create new products from one file.
The bulk update edits your whole catalog from a file: every column, up to five photos per row, and it creates the products that don't exist. Column titles are in English (“Name”, “Regular price”, “Stock”…); what you write inside goes in your language. Applying saves only in Koalab: your channels don't change until you send them the changes, in the last step.
Download your catalog
In Products, click “Bulk update”. It goes to the catalog of the tab you had open; for another one, use “Change catalog”. Download the file in Excel (or CSV, from the Starter plan): one sheet with every editable column and your real products. “Stock at export” and “Exported at” keep the stock and the time of the download: leave them as they are.
Edit it in your spreadsheet
Change whatever you need. An empty cell touches nothing; to clear a value, type CLEAR. Careful with CLEAR in “Stock”: the product stops tracking inventory and, on WooCommerce, Shopify and Tiendanube, it sells with no limit. “Image 1” to “Image 5” take the link of a photo that is already online (http:// or https://). If your photos aren't online, upload them later in “Images” with “Upload photos by SKU”.
New rows = new products
A row with no “Koalab ID” and a SKU that doesn't exist is created as a new product, as long as it fits your plan's product cap. For a product with variants, use one row per variant, each with its SKU, and the same “Parent SKU” on all of them: a new code for the overall product, which needs no row of its own. “Attributes” holds each variant's value, for example “Color: Red | Size: M”. To add a variant to a product that already exists, copy its “Koalab product ID”. Categories go by name, separated by “|”: one that doesn't exist is created.
Upload the file
Drag it in or click to choose it: Excel or CSV, up to 25 MB. Koalab reads it right away.
Mock-up: step 2, with the file chosen Check the column mapping
“How your columns are read” always shows up: Koalab proposes the matching and you fix the one that came out wrong. “Don't use this column” drops one. You can save the mapping with a name and reuse it with “Use a saved one:”.
Mock-up: the mapping, with the saved mappings and the footer to save it Look at the plan before applying
Three figures —“Will update”, “Will create” and “With problems”—, the rows with problems by reason and the columns we didn't recognize. If the new rows don't fit your plan, a notice says how many get in. If you changed a stock that also moved in Koalab since the download, a box says so row by row: your change is applied on top of what is there, unless you tick “Write the file's number as it is”. Where you didn't touch the stock, it stays as it is, with what was sold. Nothing is written until you confirm.
Apply and send it to your channels
“Apply N changes” saves only in Koalab; if something trips your alerts, it asks you first. Then comes “Saved to Koalab. Send the changes to your channels?”. “Send N products to their channels” takes what you changed —content, price and stock— to the channels where each product is already listed, and then you see how many each channel took and how many it rejected, with the reason. “Not now, I'll send it later” leaves the batch “Not sent to the channels”: you send it later from “Revert a batch” or from the Dashboard, and meanwhile Koalab doesn't let your channels overwrite it. New products aren't on any channel yet: each one comes with “Publish”, which opens the “Publish” tab of its page.
Details worth knowing
- Images given by URL are downloaded in the background and stored in Koalab.
- Changes to products that already existed stay as a batch and are undone in “Revert a batch”. Created products aren't undone that way: they are deleted from Products.
- A paused channel doesn't get the batch. When you reactivate it, it gets price, sale price and stock, plus the name, photos and description of whatever changed during the pause.
- A hand-made sheet, with no “Stock at export”, writes the stock it carries. If the stock goes down, the review warns you: an old file can undo sales. To avoid it, download the catalog right before editing.