Guide on how to export/import products in Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce, formerly Magento, includes a built-in tool to export and import products in bulk. You export the catalog to a CSV file from System > Data Transfer > Export, edit it in a spreadsheet, and bring it back through System > Data Transfer > Import, which validates every row before anything changes in the store.

Picture the merchandising director of a regional retailer two weeks before a major sales season. Prices for several thousand products must change by Friday, a new supplier has sent its catalog as a spreadsheet, and half of the product descriptions still carry last year's claims. The team is entering changes product by product in the admin. By Wednesday the work is behind, two prices have been typed with the wrong decimal and a promotional item is selling below cost. Nobody planned for the error, yet everybody could have predicted it. Manual catalog work does not fail dramatically. It fails quietly, one wrong field at a time, and customers and margins feel it before the dashboards do.

This is why bulk export and import deserves attention from executives and not only from the merchandising team. The catalog is the commercial promise of an online business. It determines what customers see, what they pay and what the warehouse ships. How quickly and how accurately it can be changed sets the pace at which the company can react to its market. This guide explains the business case first, then walks through the current export and import process in Adobe Commerce, checked against the official documentation.

Why does bulk product export and import matter to the business?

Adding a large number of products by hand is inconvenient and time-consuming, and Adobe Commerce addresses it with a built-in feature that automates product entry. Adobe's own documentation describes the logic plainly. Exporting data, editing it in a spreadsheet and importing it back is more efficient for large catalogs than making individual changes in the admin (Adobe Commerce, Data transfers). For a company, that translates into three concrete gains.

The first is speed to market. A seasonal collection, a supplier price update or a new product line can be published in hours, not weeks, which matters most in categories where prices and availability change constantly. The second is margin protection. A controlled bulk update with validation catches errors that a tired team would miss in manual entry, and it creates a record of what changed. The third is efficiency. Every hour that merchandising specialists spend retyping data is an hour not spent on assortment, pricing and promotions, the work that actually improves results.

The value changes by industry. A fashion retailer refreshes hundreds of items each season, with images, sizes and variants. A distributor of industrial supplies receives price lists from dozens of suppliers and must keep customer-specific prices aligned with them. A consumer goods manufacturer selling directly online needs the same descriptions, claims and legal information to appear across its own store and its retail partners. In each case the technical task is identical, a CSV file moving in and out of the catalog, but the business consequence is very different.

How do you export products from Adobe Commerce?

Start in the admin sidebar and select System > Data Transfer > Export. The export configuration appears, and in the Entity Type field you choose Products. Adobe Commerce also lets you export other entities, among them Advanced Pricing, Customers Main File, Customer Addresses and Stock Sources, which is useful when price or inventory data must be updated alongside the catalog (Adobe Commerce, Export data).

A table of attributes then appears. Each row can act as a filter if you want the list to be as precise as possible. In the example screenshot below only the Category ID filter is used, so that the file contains just the products of one category. Adobe notes that price, weight and the Set Product as New field use from and to ranges, and that checking the Exclude box removes an attribute's data from the file. Narrow exports are easier to review, and reviewing is where errors are caught.

At the bottom of the table, a Continue button starts the process. The page reloads, the filters close and a message at the top confirms that the request is in the queue. Here the current documentation adds a detail that matters for operations. The export runs asynchronously in the background and is processed through a message queue, so the cron job must be running for the file to be generated. Earlier guidance suggested simply waiting a couple of minutes and refreshing the page. That is usually enough, but if the file never appears, Adobe's knowledge base explains that the export consumer may need to be started manually or added to the cron configuration (Adobe Commerce Knowledge Base, exported products CSV file does not appear). Make sure someone on your technical team owns that check.

The generated files are listed below the table, and from the Select option on the right of each row you can download or delete the file. The screenshots below show that step.

The result is a file in CSV format. To read its contents you can use several programs, although OpenOffice or Google Sheets are preferable because they preserve the file's formatting, which in some versions of Excel can cause problems. A second practical recommendation is to delete any blank lines at the beginning of the file, since they can create problems during the import. If your sheet is exported with a byte order mark, Adobe warns that UTF-8 files with a BOM can also cause import failures.

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How do you import products into Adobe Commerce?

The import mirrors the export and adds a validation step that protects the catalog. Adobe Commerce requires imported data to pass validation before anything is added to the store, checking column headers, attribute values, required fields and CSV formatting. If validation fails, the import stops at the problem row so the file can be corrected and uploaded again (Adobe Commerce, Import data). The sequence is short enough to follow as numbered steps.

1. In the left sidebar, select System > Data Transfer > Import, and in the Entity Type field choose Products.
2. Under Import Behavior choose Add/Update to add new products or update existing ones, and leave the remaining values as they are unless you have a reason to change them.
3. Click Select File to Import and choose the CSV file you prepared.
4. Click Check Data in the top right corner to validate the file, and correct any errors the report lists.
5. When validation passes, click Import, wait for the confirmation message, and if there is an error, use the message to find the line number that caused it.

The screenshots below show the options at each stage. Adobe's documentation adds that the default error handling lets you stop on the first error or skip erroneous entries, that the Allowed Errors Count defaults to 10, and that every import is recorded in Import History under System > Data Transfer.

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Which mistakes make an import fail, and how do you avoid them?

Most failed imports have a few predictable causes, and the official documentation names several of them. The default file size limit is 2 MB, set in the PHP configuration, and the import page shows the current limit, so large catalogs should be split into batches. The Replace behavior should be used with care because it replaces existing product data and can erase references that were set earlier, while Add/Update leaves untouched what the file does not mention. For large catalogs, Adobe recommends omitting the categories and url_key columns unless they are actually changing, since including them regenerates URL rewrites and can cause timeouts on Adobe Commerce on cloud infrastructure.

The sample file is the best protection against typing errors. Adobe Commerce lets you download a sample CSV from the import page, and checking that column headings are spelled exactly as in the sample avoids many rejected files. Attribute names that do not exist in the system are not created during an import, and their values are not imported, so new attributes must be defined in the admin first. Images are read from a configured directory, which in recent versions is relative to the var/import/images folder, so the files must be uploaded there before the import runs.

A word on proportion is needed. These recommendations come from the platform's documentation and apply to a standard configuration. A store with custom attributes, extensions or integrations with an ERP may behave differently, and the right approach is to test every new type of import in a staging environment before it touches the live catalog. Treat the screenshots in this guide as illustrations of the flow, since labels, layouts and button colors change between versions, and rely on the labels shown in your own admin.

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Once the manual process is reliable, the natural next step is to stop doing it by hand. Adobe Commerce, though not Magento Open Source, includes scheduled import and export, which runs jobs at set times daily, weekly or monthly, reads files from a local server path or a remote FTP location, and reindexes automatically after each scheduled import (Adobe Commerce, Scheduled import and export). A distributor that receives a supplier price file every Monday can turn a weekly chore into a routine that no one has to remember, provided the validation rules and the owner are defined first.

Who should own the product catalog?

The technical steps are simple, and that is precisely the risk. A tool that makes it easy to change thousands of records in minutes also makes it easy to damage thousands of records in minutes. In many companies, nobody is formally accountable for the quality of product data. Marketing writes descriptions, purchasing negotiates prices, operations maintains stock and technology loads the files, and each assumes that someone else checks the result.

The organizations that manage this well assign an owner for the catalog, define who may approve a bulk change and set simple rules. Every import comes from a reviewed file, every price change above a defined threshold requires a second approval, and every load is recorded. None of this requires new technology. It requires a decision that the catalog is a business asset, with the same discipline applied to financial data. For a broader view of catalog data in the wider context, the article on inventory loading challenges in eCommerce shows how these problems appear when the catalog connects with stock and fulfillment.

What this means for the C-level

For the executive responsible for attracting and converting customers, catalog speed is a competitive variable. A company that can publish a new offer in an afternoon can respond to a competitor's price move, a trending product or a supplier opportunity while the window is still open. A company that needs two weeks watches the window close. The question to ask the team is not how many products they can load, but how long it takes from a decision to a live change, and how many people touch the file along the way.

For the executive responsible for margin and efficiency, the catalog process is a control point. Price errors, inconsistent product information and manual rework carry costs that rarely appear on a single line of the budget, but they erode profitability steadily. For those responsible for service and retention, accurate product information reduces returns, support contacts and the disappointment of customers who received something different from what they saw online. In all three cases, a modest investment in process and ownership pays back faster than most technology projects.

How to start on Monday morning

An experienced consultant would begin with an inexpensive test. Ask the team to export a single category, change two attributes in the spreadsheet and import the file into a staging environment, timing each step and noting every question that comes up. The exercise takes an afternoon, and it reveals who knows the process, where the documentation is missing and whether the cron and queue configuration works as expected.

Next, write down the real flow of a price or assortment change in your company, from the person who decides to the moment it appears on the site. Mark every hand-off, every manual copy and every approval that exists only informally. That map will usually show two or three places where a simple rule or an automated feed would remove most of the risk. To formalize the owners and steps, the Define Activities and Processes Toolkit from ICX offers a practical structure.

How ICX helps

ICX Consulting helps retailers, distributors and consumer goods companies turn their online store into a reliable commercial engine. Through our digital eCommerce for B2C and B2B practices, we define the catalog governance, the approval rules and the integration with ERP and inventory systems, and we use the ICX Compass methodology to prioritize what to fix first. We then implement the solution on Adobe Commerce, so that the process described in this guide becomes a controlled routine rather than a recurring emergency. For related reading, see how to create products in Adobe Commerce and how to execute mass actions in Magento.

Frequently asked questions

Can I update only the price of existing products with an import?

Yes. Use the Advanced Pricing entity for price data, or the Products entity with the Add/Update behavior and only the columns you want to change, always including the SKU. Test the file on a small sample first, because a mistaken value is applied to every row in the file.

Why does my exported file not appear in the list?

The export is processed through a message queue, so it depends on cron and the queue consumers running. If the file does not show up after a few minutes, ask your technical team to verify cron and the export consumer, which is the documented cause in several versions.

What is the difference between Add/Update, Replace and Delete?

Add/Update creates new entries and updates existing ones. Replace overwrites the data of existing entries and can remove earlier references. Delete removes the entities that match the SKUs in the file. Because the last two can destroy data, they should only be used with a backup and a reviewed file.

How large can an import file be?

By default the limit is 2 MB, defined in the server's PHP configuration, and the import page shows the current value. For larger catalogs, either split the file into batches or ask your technical team to adjust the limit, and consider automating recurring loads with a scheduled import or an integration.

If your catalog changes more often than your team can safely update it, there is a faster and more controlled way to work. Request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant and we will review how products, prices and approvals move through your store today, and where a better process would protect your margin.