Importing and exporting your products can sometimes be a tricky task. Check out our tutorial on

how to import products in Magento for more information on how to bulk add many products to your site at once. In this article, we’ve gathered some of the most common issues that occur during the export/import process. The most common ones are as follows:

If you want to learn more about how to bulk import products in Magento check out our tutorial on that subject.

• Incorrect CSV file formatting – A bad formatting of a CSV file can cause a failed data import or missing rows after the import. The issue occurs more often with CSV files created with MS Excel since CSV is more prone to data failures due to bad formatting;
• Issues with short descriptions – Although you can use a custom size for short descriptions in Magento, it is recommended that you limit them to 255 characters;
• Issues with import/export paths – The import/export paths should be writable. Otherwise, the corresponding procedures will fail. More details on how to set the files and folders permissions can be found in our cPanel tutorial;
• Problems with images locations – If we import images with the products, they should be stored in the /media/import folder. Otherwise error messages will be displayed and the images will not be imported. For example, if the value of the image collumn is /image_subfolder/image.jpg then the correct path will be /media/import/image_subfolder/image.jpg;
• Problems with multiple images import – The import of multiple images through CSV and MS Excel image, small image and thumbnail image columns is causing problems;