Magento - Importing configurable and simple products

At Fuse we are nearing the launch of another eCommerce site using the Magento platform. The biggest headache we have found with Magento is handling products where different sizes have different prices. The Magento documentation suggests that this type of product should be set up as a 'configurable product.' However in Magento, to create a configurable product, you have to create your parent product and then another product for every size and colour variation.

This means if you have a shirt in 6 colours and 12 sizes, you need to create 72 products and associate them all to your main product. Importing the data for all these variants using the standard Magento import function works, but you still have to manually associate all the products to their parent which is incredibly time consuming.

Brian at his Magento Developer Information blog has an impressive work-around for this using custom attributes. With a few code changes to one of the core Magento php pages you can import your product as one 'simple' product and use the custom attributes for the sizes and colours.

Using the standard Magento import format with Brian's code you can add your extra columns, determine whether you want the field to appear as a dropdown, radio button or text field and specify prices.

Thanks Brian, you have made our job so much simpler and saved us hours of time.

One other thing we have learned along the way is that Brian's import method loads the images (place them in the /media/import directory) but they are invisible due to a bug in Magento's import code which automatically flags uploaded images as 'exclude.' See this post on the Magento site to fix the bug in another of Magento's core files.