Merging Product Variations using Product CSV Import Suite triggers “on sale”

Last Updated on: 9th March 2016, 04:02 pm

Many customers use our Product CSV Import Suite to manage their store products. Using the “merge” function allows to update WooCommerce product fields such as stock and SKU.

If you experience that your product or product variations are set to “on sale” regardless of their set sale schedule after merging variations, than you need to check your merge CSV for entries that are not yet present in your store.

Merging a variation that does not exist, will result in an import instead (since it did not exist before) and also cause the issue.

Here is the scenario:

• Lets say on of your product attributes used for variation is color.
• You prepare your merge CSV and accidentally also enter a variation for update which is not set for your product.
• Your other variations for the same product all have set sales prices, but their on sale is scheduled and at the moment inactive.
• After you have “merge-imported” the new variation, the following has happened.

For each “merge-imported” variation, a new variations is created and enabled. However instead of a set attribute (Color = yellow) “Any attribute value” is set because in the merge CSV there are no set colours to begin with.

This happens because you did not put any attribute info in your merge CSV.

This creates an “empty” variation which prevails over all the others (and also messes with all other variations in the parent product). As a result sales schedule for the other present variations are ignored. Any variation that has a set sales price gets put “on sale” because of the “merge-import”, regardless of their set sales schedule.

Now in a perfect world our extension would pick up on this and automagically prevent this from happening. In the normal world, you can let us know via our Ideas Board here: http://ideas.woothemes.com/– our developer check there frequently, so do drop us a line.