Firebear Improved Import Export Magento 2 Extension FAQ

No, you can handle it on your own. However, prepare to study the information on how Magento 2 import works, and learn how to work with the entity attributes.

We have composed guides and manuals to help you get into Magento 2 data transfer processes. Firebear Studio blog is the most complete source of information on how Magento 2 import functions on the web.

You can start by reading these articles:

• The Complete Guide to Magento 2 product import/export
• Magento 2 Google Sheet Import
• How To Import Customers & Customer Addresses To Magento 2

Every piece of information on import and export processes can be found inside Magento 2 import and export guide list.

You can also create a ticket and ask Firebear Studio support team for advice.

Yes, we do. We have composed an explicit manual that describes every option of Improved Import and provides necessary examples. For every entity you can import to your Magento 2 we have also composed a dedicated blog post, where we describe every single attribute and list entity import peculiarities.

• Read Improved Import & Export manual
• Read Guide List for every supported Magento 2 entity

Yes, you can find the demo store here.

A guided product tour is available by this link.

And if you want a private demo of the Magento 2 Enterprise/Commerce version of the extension, please leave your request in the chat window in the bottom left corner of the screen.

The extension has an open code. Meaning that your in-house developer can make necessary adjustments if required, or completely customize the extension.

However, in case the customization is done to extension, we may be of limited assistance with technical support if anything breaks.

Additionally, heavy customizations mean that you will likely have issues with updating the extension to the newest version.

We advise having your developer provide you with the exact list of the modifications made, including file names and paths. Every modification should be thoroughly described. Developers tend to come and go, however, you will be working with the extension, and it is better to have everything ready for another developer to jump into the project.

Improved Import and Export is PWA-compatible. The functionality is purely backend-operational and it doesn’t affect the frontend performance of your store.

The code of the extension is open, you can have your developers study the extension code, and make necessary modifications.
We also offer a customization module for building plug-ins for Improved Import & Export extension.

Improved Import & Export is an extension that works similar to native Magento 2 import, however covers every Magento 2 entity, introduces support of multiple file types and sources. Refer to the table below for comparison.

Development – the extension is being developed by certified Magento 2 specialists. We are a proud member of ExtDN – a network of developers that try to take the extension development to a new level of quality.

Support – six months of support are included in the extension price. Along with technical assistance, you can consult Firebear specialists on how to handle your import and export cases to make the solution suitable for your needs.

New features every quarter or often – we are constantly improving the extension by introducing new entities, new sources, new file type support, and other conveniences.

Long run instead of a short job – import and export processes can improve your management and overall store performance. Integrations with CRM and ERP software, stock and price updates, customer and order management – this is the daily routine Improved Import & Export has been built for. When purchasing an import extension, think about how it can benefit you in the long run and think about the ROI.

Integrations – we have built many integrations with CRM and ERP software to make Magento 2 the center of your business platform. Instead of SAAS, we offer every connector for a fixed price.

Migration from Magento 1 or Magento 2 stores – we have developed a free migration add-on of Improved Import and Export which features direct database connection and allows for migration of every Magento entity one by one with filters and mapping support.

We tend to release new versions with updates at least every month. Minor releases with bugfixes tend to take up to two-three weeks, including testing, and fixes. Major releases introducing new functionality, entity support, and other features, tend to take about a month.

You can always refer to the Improved Import & Export extension change log to look through the release dates.

With some modifications to the extension’s code – yes. Submit a support ticket with an inquiry. Maybe we already had a customer with the same request and have a ready code.

Generally, if you have a third-party extension that introduces a custom entity, or adds custom attributes to the existing entity, Improved Import can be adjusted to fetch necessary attributes.

However, it heavily depends on the modifications to the Magento 2 code. Anyways, hit us a line, and we will try to help.

Custom attributes for the entities which do not support manual creation of the attributes by the native means of Magneto 2 is a matter to look into.

 Submit a support ticket and provide the Firebear team with samples of the files you want to import. We will try to help you.

We try to support all the most popular third-party extensions that make any changes to the entities of Magento 2. Currently supported extensions include:

• MageWorx Advanced Product Options for Magento 2
• MageStore Inventory Management
• Wyomind Advanced Inventory
• Magedelight Price per Customer

 Submit a support ticket and provide the Firebear team with samples of the files you want to import. We will try to help you.

We are always having a poll on the new features to add to the Improved Import and Export extension you can find here.

If you require a particular feature developed for your project or require it on short notice, you can submit a help desk ticket. In the ticket, please describe what you want to achieve by composing a simplistic technical specification. Direct the support team to ask you questions.

After the feature request has been confirmed and discussed we will make you an offer you can accept or reject.

Yes, it does. The extension allows you to import and export orders, tracking codes, create shipping, and more. For more information read the Improved Import manual, and try out the demo store.

FireBear offers the free Magento 2 migration add-on of Improved import and Export that allows performing migration of a Magento 1 store database to a Magento 2 instance or transferring data between two Magento 2 sites. Similar to the parent extension, the add-on requires no programming skills from users and supports transfers of all Magento 1 entities to Magento 2. The details on how to arrange a migration with the add-on you can find in the manual.

Also, we provide assisted migration so that our team will help you with the migration process. For requesting Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration contact our support team.

The extension has numerous means for enabling synchronization between Magento 2 and other ecommerce systems, including file transfers, FTP/SFTP, or direct connection via API. The mapping feature allows you to transform data to a form applicable for Magento 2 logic. As the migration works you can see following the example of FireBear Woocomerce to Magento 2 migration add-on.

Improved Import and Export is extremely user-friendly. Starting with the extension requires no programming knowledge.

Each import and export you can configure at the corresponding tab at the Admin sidebar: System > Improved Import/Export > Import/Export Jobs. For each import or export job, you can select a particular entity for a transfer, set up behavior, choose the best options for data sources and file formats, map attribute values.

You can learn the details of the import and export configuration by exploring the extension demo and extension manual.

At the moment, Improved Import and Export is the extension exclusive to Magento 2 platform. However, the extension has a high connectivity potential and can process data transferred from other e-commerce platforms or Magento 1 and prepare Magento 2 data for implementation into other system databases via integration add-ons.

Magento 2.0 and 2.1 are outdated in relation to the platform feature set and current technical requirements. Magento, an Adobe Company, has already stopped supporting the versions and moved on to newer PHP/MYSQL versions and upgraded system functionality.

As of now, only a few merchants use Magento 2.0 and 2.1 versions for their stores. So to maintain the moderate price of Improved Import and Export on the same level we’ve decided to stop the versions support as well.

API for import and export jobs is currently under development. The estimated time for the API release is 2021 till then you can turn to Magento API. As Improved Import and Export has open code you can modify it upon wish at any time.

Yes, you are protected with a 30-days money-back guarantee. Meaning, that you can request a refund within 30 days of the date of the purchase. 30 days mark comes from the limitations of the payment methods used.

Yes, FREE installation in the purchase of any paid Firebear Studio extension. If you require installation – please submit a support ticket with the request and SSH access to your Magento 2 store server and admin panel.

Six months of technical assistance are also included in the extension price. After the six months period, if you require additional technical assistance you can renew the support period from your account at https://firebearstudio.com/

Support is an ongoing procedure. Your Magento 2 store is constantly developing, gets new extensions installed, new processes implemented, etc. That’s why technical issues may arise. Especially if you have integrated your CRM or ERP systems via Improved Import & Export extension. Third-party software is being updated constantly, and reevaluating and re-adjusting solutions take time and human hours.

Updates are also dependent on a couple of facts. Magento 2 updates and releases of the new versions mean that Firebear has to spend more time testing the extensions. 2.3 version of Magento differs greatly from 2.2, and 2.2 differs from 2.1. In addition, the Firebear development team constantly improves the Import extension. In a year the extension you have purchased will get a dozen new features, required polish, and speed improvements.

These two processes are constant, that is why we charge you for the updates and technical assistance. However, we don’t make it mandatory. You decide if you need new features, or if everything works fine and you are happy with the extension as it is of now.

The rule is – one extension license per single LIVE Magento 2 installation. You can use the extension on multiple development environments, however, the license agreement only allows the use of the extension on a single live Magento 2 store.

Multiple stores and store views are supported and allowed.

Yes, you can do this. However, you must stop using and delete the extension from the previous instance. You are limited to a single live Magento 2 installation with installed extension per license.

If you want to have multiple Magento 2 installations with Firebear Studio extensions installed – you need to purchase additional licenses.

Please submit a help desk ticket and provide all the required details, including purchase information so we could confirm that you are the owner of the account.

Firebear support team is only interested in providing technical assistance with the Improved Import and Export extension and solving any issues you might have with it.

You may want to restrict the SSH access to the required directories and database tables if you would like.

At the moment we are not offering the extension for a trial.

However, we offer a 30-days money-back guarantee. So, in case the extension doesn’t work as you have expected you can always ask for a refund.

Our support team responses within 24 hours. Each and every case is reviewed individually and may take different amount of time to be solved. When you get your ticket resolved depends solely on the complexity of the task.

We provide support in both English and Russian.

If it is needed, we can provide communication with our developers via TeamViewer.

We provide free installation and configuration services. As for custom work, we may provide it for free, if it is not that complex in terms of support.

As for complex solutions, we will need to estimate the project first.

Contact our support team to get the best price on the extension.

Import Recommendations:

1. Specify the Validation Strategy option to Skip error entries to import the only valid entities from the file.
2. Analyze the import job log and find data in the file which may be the cause of the issue.
3. Check if you have installed the last version of Improved Import Export.

Export Recommendations:

1. Analyze the export job log and check the reason for the issue.
2. Check if you have installed the latest version of Improved Import Export.

Import Recommendations:

1. Try to split the file into several small files and import the files one by one.
2. Check that other processes like the reindex, the other import not run at the same time.
3. Use the Deferred Import Images option to import images by The Message Queue Framework.
4. Use the Enabled Cache Products option to import the only updated products after the latest job execution.

Export Recommendations:

1. Use the filters to export only the needed entities.
2. Use the Consecutive Export option to export only new items after the latest job execution.

Import Recommendations:

1. Change the Bunch size file attribute value to manage the entity count which is stored in the one database table row. To change the value go to Stores > Setting > Configurations > FIREBEAR STUDIO > Import Export -> Import Config.
2. Specify the General File Bunch Size and the Import FormatV2 Bunch Size values.

Export Recommendations:

1. For export products to the CSV file: use the Export page by page option and specify the Page size attribute value on the Export Behavior tab.
2. Use the filters to export only the needed entities.
3. Use the Consecutive Export option to export only new items after the latest job execution.

In case you didn’t use the composer for installing the extension you may be missing the box/Spout library, which is required to import and export XLSX and ODS file formats. To fix the issue, in the command line, run:

If you have used the composer for installing the extension, the library should add automatically.

You can use the dedicated entity ‘Product Attributes’ to import and create attributes in your Magento 2 store. The step-by-step guide with sample tables can be found inside the  Improved Import & Export Guide List blog post.

There are two possible options how can one import images along with products:

1. For product image attributes use direct URL links. This way the extension will upload all images during the import
2. Upload all product images into the /pub/media/import folder of your Magento 2 installation. This way the extension will always have a fresh reference to the product images.

NOTE: in your imported file, the values of all product image attribute columns should only include the path to product images relative to your import folder. For example, you’ve uploaded firebear.jpg to /pub/media/import, then you only need to insert /firebear.jpg to your CSV file.

Additionally, Starting from version 2.1.2 the extension comes with the Use Image Import Source switch. The switch decides how the extension will handle image paths if your source is FTP or SFTP.

• If the Use Image Import Source switch is disabled, the extension will look for the images inside your Magento 2 root catalog, according to the path specified in any image attribute columns of the import table.
• If the Use Image Import Source switch is enabled, the extension will look for the images INSIDE of the FTP/SFTP according to the path specified in any image attribute columns of the import table.

Upload all images to /pub/media/import folder relative to your Magento 2 root folder.

Insert the image list into the additional_images column of the imported table. The image links should only contain a path relative to /pub/media/import and multiple image links should be separated by a comma. For example, if you uploaded all your images to /pub/media/import/my_products, the image path should look like this:

/my_products/image1.png,/my_products/image2.png,… etc.

If you are using CSV files, – make sure that the ‘Multiple value separator’ field value is set to comma.

Yes, you can. For CSV files you can set custom separators for multiple values and particular attributes. To do this, – navigate to the import job, and find two fields:

• Category Levels separated by
• Categories separated by

In these two fields, you can specify the separators your custom file is using.

Run the command line:

or

Where X is the ID of the job you can find in the import and export job grids.

Downloadable products are imported as all other product types, without particular peculiarities. We have composed a dedicated guide to help you import downloadable products. Please read the How to Import Downloadable Products blog post.

You can also look through sample files for downloadable product import:

• Google Sheet sample CSV table
• Firebear Studio GitHub with CSV, XML, Json, ODS, XLSX sample file types

Improved Import & Export extension can import product attributes to your Magento 2 store. With the Attributes entity, you can create multiple values for any attribute type without any problems. Read how to import product attributes.

In the Google Sheet sample table for Product Attributes you can see two columns:

Option:base_value and option:value. ‘Base’ value sets the admin value for the attribute. While ‘option:value’ sets the value for a particular store view.

There can be two causes of the issue:

1. You already have a product at your Magento 2 store with the same URL
2. Magento 2 specific issue that hasn’t been resolved

Both causes can be avoided using the Generate URL if duplicate setting of Improved Import & Export extension. When the setting is enabled in the import job, the duplicate URLs for both products and categories will be incremented if indeed the same URL already exists.

In the case of Magento 2 specific import issue, we have fixed it for Improved Import. So, if there are no actual duplicates in URL, your products and categories should be created successfully.

Please note, you may want to clear ‘url’ product attribute in the table you are importing. If there is no URL specified in the imported table, – Magento 2 will try to automatically create a URL for the products based on its ‘name’ attribute.

Please make sure the value for ‘qty’ column in your imported table is greater than zero. If product quantity is not set or set to ‘0’ your Magento 2 considers such products as out of stock. Such products will only be enabled if you have allowed backorder functionality inside your store. You can enabled backorders at Stores>Configuration > Catalog > Inventory > Product Stock Options > Backorders.

Then, make sure that ‘is_in_stock’ column of your file is set to ‘1’. Even if you have set product quantity, this product attribute can set the product as ‘Out of Stock’ if set to ‘0’.

Please make sure the value for ‘product_online’ column in your CSV file is set to ‘1’. This attribute allows you to enable or disable the product. The value for the disabled is ‘2’ not ‘0’ as one would expect. Make sure to consider it.

It seems that you are using special characters in the CSV file you are trying to import. To solve this problem, you can remove special characters or replace special characters with HTML code. Please follow this link to check for allowed characters: https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_symbols.asp

Improved Import extension will download the product images from the external server to your website automatically. Moreover, we have considered the path you have specified to the image files with the Use Image Import Source settings.

Use Image Import Source allows you to tell the extension where to look for image paths – either inside your Magento 2 root folder or, if the option enabled, insider FTP, SFTP, or Dropbox.

For example, if in the imported table you have specified the path to the image as /folder1/folder2/image.png. The setting will define where the extension will look for this path – inside Magento 2 root of your server or inside FTP, SFTP, Dropbox, depending on where your file is located.

Please go to your phpmyadmin account, then access your database, next find setup_module table, next please delete row containing ‘Firebear_ImportExport’ entry.

After the row is deleted – run the upgrade in the command line: php bin/magento setup:upgrade

Try to flush the redis cache.

You can find sample CSV files for all the supported entities in Master Google Sheets Table, Master Google Sheets Table for B2B entities. Sample files for other file formats you can get at FireBear GitHub.

All the values in an import file can be separated with a special symbol, however, make sure to specify the same value separator during the import in the ‘Import Behavior’ settings. This way the extension will be able to process import data correctly.

The built-in mapping functionality of Improved import and Export allows modifying attribute, attribute values, and categories.

Mapping of attributes gives users the ability to match system attributes with the ones presented in the import table.

Mapping of attribute values matches system attribute values to the import values.

Category mapping helps create new categories during import, load new categories from the import file, and control the path to the category in the store.

If Remove Current Mappings is enabled – the map attribute section will not be processed. 

Also, you can apply default attribute values to all the rows in a table or only to the empty rows.

Price adjustments can be applied right at the import job page. Scroll down the import job settings to the mapping field where you can find the ‘Price Rules’ section. Here you can round prices and special prices and generate rules for import product prices based on percent or fixed rates.

You can try to set up cron schedules for import or export jobs and run another via the console. However, keep in mind that in this case server load may influence the overall speed negatively. Manual job running certainly won’t help speed the processes up.

Yes, you can set up an export job to run after the following events within Magento 2:

• catalog_product_save_after,
• sales_order_save_after,
• checkout_submit_save_after.

Specifying the export trigger event can be done in the general settings of an export job in the corresponding ‘Events’ field.

REST and SOAP APIs are supported data sources for improved import. You can transfer your data files using API connection. To do so enable API at the ‘Import Settings’ section during import job configuration and select the relevant API connection at the ‘Import Sources‘ section. Then decide on the file format and enter the necessary call info.

You can request the file format support as a feature here.

You can import any entities supported by the extension with partial attributes as the functionality can both add new data and update the existing entities. However, you should keep in mind that with each partial import you will have to specify the required attributes that enable data processing during import. You can find which attributes are considered required in our Master Google Sheets Table in the description to each of them.

At the moment, the extension doesn’t support the logic. However, you can request the feature in our request form here.

The short answer is ‘probably yes’. However, it greatly depends on which code modifications in the core Magento 2 files has made the third party extension.

If you want to ensure the proper work of Improved Import and Export extension with the third-party module, you may want to set up the development environment and run necessary tests.

We offer a 30-days money-back guarantee. In case the extension doesn’t work as you expected, you can ask for a refund by submitting a help desk ticket.