Update Price, MSRP, Weight Fields

[Toner Evans]

We have about 430,000 products in our store. In the past, I have used the Dataport utility to "update" the "Price" field, "MSRP" field and "Weight" fields using the "Products CSV Upload" by choosing the "Only Update" option, and manual mapping option to match the text file containing the data to be updated, without issue.

Is this a proper use of the Dataport Utility? The reason I am asking, I had been using it to update pricing and my webmaster says that this is not the proper use of the utility, as it is a "compiled" application and he does not know what it is doing.

I am trying to find an easy means by which to update the price/MSRP on a monthly basis without having to incur costly programming fees from my webmaster.

Thank you for your reply!

[jmestep]

If it updates the price correctly, why would that be a problem that the webmaster doesn't know what it is doing? His code should run off the Able product price and if you update it, it's saved in the products table where he can access it.
That is what the dataport was created for.

[Toner Evans]

Judy,

Thank you very much for your reply.

The webmaster said that the Dataport tool was designed to migrate store data and should not be used to update data.

Is it designed to be used to update data like "Price"? From what I have read in the forums, many people use it for just that purpose.

We have monthly pricing updates from our vendor and needed a means to update our pricing on the web. Earlier this year, I began to use the Dataport CSV Data Upload, Products Data Upload, to update the "Price" and "MSRP" fields. Under "Import Options", I selected "Only UPDATE existing objects", used the default template and created my text file so that it only contained the fields "ProductId", "Name", "Price", "MSRP", "Weight", "Shippable" and "VisibilityId". This appeared to be working fine until we started to get shipping errors on some orders (Item not shippable to the selected destinition). My review of the "ac_Products" data showed some errors which were quickly fixed.

I tihnk that he is trying to get me to pay him 20 hours to create a means by which to update my data.