BigCommerce Product Import Template

BigCommerce's product import is built around one column that does not exist on other platforms. Item Type tells the importer whether a row is a product or a SKU belonging to the product above it. Understand that column and the rest of a BigCommerce product import is straightforward.

Ignore it and you get a catalogue of orphan SKUs, or three separate products where you wanted one with a size selector.

What is in the BigCommerce product import template

Twenty seven core columns with a worked example row. It covers identity, pricing, physical dimensions, category, inventory, identifiers, the first image pair and the SEO fields.

It deliberately does not include option and custom field columns, because those are specific to your catalogue and BigCommerce names them after your own option sets. Add them once you know what your options are called, taking the names from an export of a product you have already built by hand.

Item Type, products and SKUs

A simple product with no options is a single row with Item Type set to Product. That is most of a hardware catalogue.

A product with options is one Product row followed by one SKU row per combination. Each SKU row inherits from the Product row immediately above it and carries only what differs: its own product code, its own stock level, and a price if it differs from the parent.

Row order is load bearing here in a way it is not on other platforms. A SKU row that appears before its Product row has nothing to attach to, and the importer does not go looking. Sort the file so that every product is immediately followed by its own SKUs, and never sort the file alphabetically after you have built it.

The example row in the template is a Product row for a 300mm shelf bracket, product code ABC-1234-300. A three size range would add SKU rows beneath it for the other two lengths.

Category paths

Categories use a forward slash separated path: Brackets/Shelf Brackets. BigCommerce creates any level that does not already exist.

That is convenient, and it is also how stores end up with Shelf Brackets, Shelf brackets and Shelf Brackets with a trailing space, all as separate categories, each holding a third of the range. Nothing in the import warns you, because from the importer's point of view you asked for three categories.

Fix the taxonomy before the import rather than after. Decide the list, check the spelling and the capitalisation, and paste the paths from that list rather than typing them per row.

Multiple categories are separated by semicolons in the same cell. A product in three categories is one cell, not three rows.

The four price columns

BigCommerce has four, and they do different jobs. Getting them confused is the most common commercial error in a BigCommerce product import.

Price is what the customer pays.

Retail Price is the was price, used to render the strikethrough and the saving. It has no effect on what is charged.

Cost Price is internal margin data. It is never displayed, and it powers the profit reporting that most stores never switch on because the column was left empty at import.

Sale Price overrides Price for as long as it is set. This is the one that causes trouble: a value left in Sale Price from a previous promotion keeps selling the product at last season's discount, and it does not expire on its own. If you are not running a promotion, that column should be empty, not zero.

Inventory and visibility

Track Inventory takes "by product" or "by option". Products with SKU rows normally track by option, so stock is held against each size rather than against the product as a whole. Getting this wrong means overselling a size that ran out three weeks ago.

Current Stock Level and Low Stock Level go on the row that holds the stock, so on the SKU rows when tracking by option.

Product Visible? takes TRUE or FALSE. Importing a large range as FALSE, checking it, then switching visibility in bulk is a safer sequence than importing live and fixing in public.

Identifiers and images

Product UPC/EAN is where the barcode goes. Digits only, and format the column as text before you type, because Excel drops the leading zero the first time the file is opened.

Manufacturer Part Number is the manufacturer's own code, not your internal one. Feeds and marketplaces treat these as different things, and using your own code here is a quiet cause of Google Shopping disapprovals later.

Product Image File columns are numbered, one URL per column, each with a matching description column for the alt text. The alt text column is optional and worth filling in: it is one of the few fields in a product feed that serves a screen reader and a search engine at the same time, and it is nearly always left empty.

Page Title, Meta Description and Search Keywords

Three SEO columns that most imports leave blank, at which point BigCommerce falls back to the product name and generates nothing for the description.

Page Title should carry the brand, the product and the key attribute. "Heavy Duty Steel Shelf Bracket 300mm | Acme" rather than "Shelf Bracket".

Meta Description is a sentence or two written for a person deciding whether to click, not a keyword list.

Search Keywords feeds the store's internal search, not Google. It is the right place for the words customers use that you do not: the trade name, the old part number, the common misspelling. Internal search that returns nothing is a conversion problem, and this column is the cheapest fix for it.

Before you import

Build one product of each shape by hand in the admin first, a simple one and one with options, then export them. That export is the definitive template for your store, including your own option column names, and it takes fifteen minutes.

Then import five products, check them on the front end rather than in the admin, and only then run the full file.

Generating the file rather than maintaining it

A BigCommerce import file is a destination format. Keeping the catalogue in it means the Item Type ordering, the category paths and the four price columns get re-checked by a person every time, which is both slow and the sort of task that goes wrong when somebody is in a hurry.

Holding the product record once and generating the file from it removes that repetition: the Product and SKU rows come out of the variant model in the right order, the category paths come from a controlled list rather than from typing, and Sale Price is empty unless a promotion says otherwise. That is what SKULaunch does upstream of the store, and it leaves this template useful for the first load and for one off ranges.