Auctions have been a means of buying and selling products for decades. Bids are placed for every item that is for sale at an auction. Online auctions are handy when you want to buy or sell products from across the world.
Ultimate Auction Pro is one among the many auction plugins available in the WordPress space. In this post, I will talk about; ‘The Smart Way to Import Multiple Products to your Ultimate Auction Website?’
What is the Bulk Import feature?
The Ultimate Auction Pro plugin allows you to auction unlimited number of products from the website. The manual process of adding multiple auction products can become tedious. With the bulk import feature, you can effortlessly upload a CSV file containing product details instead of manually creating every single auction item in the list.
Let’s take a look how you can add multiple auctions using this import functionality.
Step 1: Create Categories
The auction listings are usually categorized. If you want to categorize the auction listings, you will have to create these categories beforehand. You can also add subcategories. In my example, I have already created a few categories like Fashion, Mobile etc. The subcategories Samsung and Apple are created for the Mobile category. Once you are done with adding the categories you can check the ‘Your Auctions’ tab. If you are adding the auction list items for the first time the screen looks something like the image below. Initially, there are no items listed for the auction. If you have previously added items, they will be displayed in this section with details.
Step 2: Import view
- Click the Import tab available on your dashboard.
- In the import section, the ‘Download Sample CSV’ and ‘Download Readme’ are available on the left. On the right is an option for you to upload your own CSV file
- A CSV file is downloaded by clicking the ‘Download Sample CSV’ button. This file contains titles of the fields from the ‘Add Auction’ form
- On clicking the ‘Download Readme’ button, a text file is displayed. This readme file contains a description of each attribute/field in the CSV file.
Attributes in the CSV file
Most of the attributes in the file are self-explanatory and can be understood from the Readme file. Some of the attributes may need an explanation for better understanding of the terms mentioned in the file. You have to add details of each auction item based on these attributes in the CSV file downloaded earlier and import the same. Following is a list of the fields that are mandatory in the CSV file to be uploaded.
- wdm_bidding_engine => This is the type of bidding engine you want to activate for a particular auction item. Currently, two types are available, Simple and Proxy bidding engines. Acceptable values: keep empty for Simple/default engine and use ‘proxy’ for Proxy bidding
- post_title => Enter item title. Mandatory field
- ua_auction_category => Set slug of the category that you already have on your website. Optional, but if you add a sub-category, then this field is mandatory
- wdm_listing_starts => Auction start date. Optional. Only needed if you have to Schedule an auction for future, otherwise keep the field empty
- wdm_listing_ends => Auction ending date for the item. Mandatory field. You must enter the future date, otherwise the auction will expire immediately after upload
- For above date fields: Accepted format: ‘yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss’. You must enter the date within quotes in above format in the CSV file, otherwise your file viewer may auto format date to something else which is not accepted by the plugin. But this can happen if, you are viewing it in a tabular format as a Xls file. If you are viewing the CSV file as a normal text file where you see values separated by a comma, then nothing to do
- wdm_shipping_country => Item Location (Enter Country Code e.g. US, IN etc). Mandatory field
- wwdm_int_shipping_price => International shipping price
- wdm_payment_method => Payment Method for the particular auction item. Acceptable values: ‘method_paypal’ (for PayPal), ‘method_wire_transfer’ (for Wire Transfer), ‘method_mailing’ (for Cheque), ‘method_cash’ (for Cash). Mandatory field. You can add multiple entries in the CSV file. With the help of the description given in the ‘Readme file’.
Step 3: Uploading the CSV file
We do the following to upload the CSV file.
- Click on ‘Choose file’ button available on the left side of the ‘Import’ tab
- Select the file you want to upload
- Click the ‘Import’ button
This will start uploading your auctions to the site. In my example, I have some live auctions and a scheduled auction i.e. for one auction I have set a start date as well as an end date.
Once all the items are uploaded and listed, the auctions are visible on the ‘Import’ tab page. The items in the CSV file are uploaded along with all the details specified in the file. You can view these auction products from the Your Auction-> Live Auctions or Scheduled Auctions
To check if all the attributes of the auction items are added, you can edit any of the items uploaded. The process of adding the auction listings to your site is uncomplicated and it saves time. All you have to do is create categories and upload the file with the necessary details. If you wish to share your thoughts or have any doubts, you may comment in the section below.
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