Importing product identifiers, shipping and visibility

Beyond the basics of title, price and stock, a WooCommerce product carries a few fields that matter for search, delivery and where it shows up. Super Speedy Imports can map all of them straight from your CSV. This article covers product identifiers (GTIN and friends), shipping details, catalog visibility, and a handy way to build a value out of several columns at once.

Product identifiers: GTIN, UPC, EAN, ISBN

WooCommerce 9.2 and later store a single global unique identifier for a product, used for GTIN, UPC, EAN or ISBN. Map a column to the GTIN, UPC, EAN, or ISBN field, in the Stock Management/Inventory section, and it is written to the product’s _global_unique_id meta.

This is where you also find SKU, which sits at the top of that section.

Shipping (Pro)

The Shipping section (a Pro feature) lets you map the physical details WooCommerce uses to calculate delivery:

• Weight, in your store’s configured weight unit, written to _weight.
• Length, Width and Height, in your store’s configured dimension unit, written to _length, _width and _height.
• Shipping Class, which is written to the product_shipping_class taxonomy. New shipping classes are created as needed, so you do not have to set them up in WooCommerce first.

Visibility: Featured and Catalog Visibility

WooCommerce keeps three flags, Featured, catalog visibility and out-of-stock status, as terms in the product_visibility taxonomy. You can set them on import from Publication Info:

• Featured. Truthy values such as 1, yes or true turn it on; empty, 0, no or false turn it off.
• Catalog Visibility. Use one of visible (shop and search), catalog (shop only), search (search only) or hidden (neither).

Super Speedy Imports combines these two with the product’s stock status into the correct product_visibility terms for you. If you would rather set the terms yourself, mapping the product_visibility taxonomy directly overrides this for the whole import.

The out-of-stock term follows stock in a full import and in Only update prices & other item details: when a file moves a product to or from out of stock, WooCommerce’s Hide out of stock items from the catalog setting hides or shows it straight after the import.

Building a value from several columns: the Editor method

Sometimes the value you want does not sit in a single column. The Editor mapping method (available in every edition) lets you build a destination value from literal text plus {Column Name} merge tokens, with no PHP.

For example, a Description built as:

{title} by {brand}. Ships from {warehouse}.

pulls in three columns and the fixed words around them. The Editor works for post fields, post meta and taxonomies. For the Description field it is a full rich-text editor with an Insert field button on the toolbar, so you can drop columns in as you type.

If instead you want the same fixed value on every row, use the Value method and type a constant. This needs no PHP either, and selecting Value with an empty box clears that field.

Written for Super Speedy Imports 3.40.0.