This section provides information that helps you plan your import.

Versioning Considerations

You do not have to add assets to a project to import them, but you do have to be working in the context of a project. When you import new and modified assets, Merchandising adds them to your project. Property values for modified assets are updated with the values you import. Unmodified assets are not added to the project.

Merchandising does not export or import asset versioning information. When you export assets that you intend to re-import, be sure that you export the latest version of the asset to avoid accidentally overwriting properties with obsolete values.

If you check out an asset and edit a property value in your project, and then import an updated value for that same property, there is no record of your earlier edits. You can revert changes to the asset, but the properties revert to the values in the main version, not those in your project version prior to import.

Security

To import changes to an asset, you must have Write access for the asset and any changed properties you want to import. Because the export feature requires only list and view privileges, it is possible that you can export an asset but not be able to import that asset. For more information about user permissions, contact your administrator or see Managing User Access and Security in the Content Administration Programming Guide

Importing Assets in a Multisite Environment

In a multisite environment, each catalog asset is assigned Sites and Parent Categories properties. Merchandising does not import either of these properties for catalog items, but it does import the Sites property for promotions.

Importing Time-Based Pricing

All pricing, either non-time-based or time-based, is imported together. The import process will support the same SKU/product appearing multiple times within an import file. However, when an end date value is received that is earlier than the start date value, the import process displays an error and the price item is not imported. For example, if a SKU has an end date of 1/20/15, but a start date of 5/12/15, an import error will occur.

Importing Tender-Based Promotions

When importing promotions, if the import file does not contain a payment type, no payment type will be associated with the promotion. This means that all payment types will be accepted for this promotion. If there is a payment type included in the import file, for example creditCard:Visa, then the promotion will only be applied towards orders using the Visa credit card.