Importing and exporting your customers

You are able to Export your customer data using CSV (Comma-Separated Values) or Excel spreadsheet files.

When exporting data, you can choose to either export your entire customer database, or you can filter your customer list using a saved custom search, and then export just the customers selected by the filters.

You can also Import new customers into your store using a CSV file.

This feature gives you the ability to perform a bulk import of customer records into your store, which is useful if you want to migrate an existing customer database from a previous system. It is also useful if you want to import the customer data that you have collected from other marketing efforts such as trade shows or email campaigns.

Exporting Customers

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  Export and Import customers

You will find all the export and import options on the Customers page, in the sidebar at the bottom.

You will see three sections in the Import and Export box.

• Export All Customers
• Export Current Customer Group
• Import Customers

Each of the export sections indicates how many customer records will be included in the export file.

Choose Export All Customers if you want to select the entire customer database. You will find two links in that section offering you a choice to download either a CSV file or an Excel spreadsheet file.

The second section Export Current Customer Group will allow you to export only the customer records that have been filtered by the currently selected filters and tags. Again, you will find two links in that section offering you the choice to download either a CSV file or an Excel spreadsheet file.

Importing Customers

Select the Export all products link on the Products page to download a CSV file containing all of the products in your online store. This file can be used as a backup for your product data, or as a template which you can modify to create an update CSV file to modify your product data.

Please refer to the following section on Importing Products for details on the format of the CSV file.

Customer Export/Import File Format

Your CSV file needs to adhere to the following conventions in order for it to be used to import customers.

You can freely use UTF-8 character encodings for names and addresses, but be sure to create them using a Unicode or UTF-8 enabled program. The OpenOffice.org suite of programs is suitable for this purpose.

A CSV file (Comma-Separated Values) file is a plain text file with commas delimiting the fields. The first line of the CSV file is the header, and contains the name of the fields. The sample template CSV file can assist you with the correct heading values.

The first line of the CSV file must have the following heading columns.

Title
First Name
Last Name
Email
Company
Address1
Address2
City
State
Country
Postcode
Phone
Accepts Marketing
Total Spent
Total Orders
Tags
Note