Importing products
Your catalog comes into Cascade as a CSV upload. Open Products, choose Import from the actions menu, and pick your file. The import runs in the background, so you can leave the page. Progress and any problems show up under Settings, Imports.
Products are what reviews, orders and wishlists hang off, so import them before anything else.
Columns
One row per record: a row is either a product or one of its variants, and every row says which product it belongs to.
A product with two variants looks like this:
A product with no variants is a single row with variant and product left blank.
One row per record
product is what ties a variant to its product, so no row depends on the ones above it. You
can sort, filter or pivot the file in a spreadsheet and it still imports the same way.
Where two rows claim the same product slug and disagree on a value, the first non-empty value in the file wins and the row that was ignored is reported. A blank cell means "not specified" rather than "empty", so it never overwrites what another row for the same product said.
Files written in the older format, where variant rows follow their product row and carry no
product column, still import unchanged: a variant row that leaves product blank belongs
to the product above it.
Running it twice
Slugs make an import safe to repeat. Importing the same file again updates those products and variants in place instead of adding a second copy of each.
A product's variant rows are its full set. A variant that Cascade has stored and the file leaves out is deleted, as is a link to a site the file no longer lists, so send whole products rather than partial ones.
When a row doesn't match
An import doesn't stop at the first bad row. Rows that can't be placed are skipped, and each one is listed with its row number on the import job under Settings, Imports:
Fix those rows and import the file again.