Once your products are in Magento you will probably want to change settings.
For example all my products had a quantity of 0 and were not visible or included in searches. To get started quickly I want to change everything to in stock and display the items in the search and catalogue.
Once again we can do this by exporting and importing a file rather than go through everything individually.
Change 1 item to the way you want it by editing the first product on the page.
Catalogue>Manage products>Edit a product.
For one product I changed the following in the product edit from the menu on the right hand side:
General: Status to Enabled, Visibility to Catalogue, Search
Prices: Tax Class
Inventory: Quantity, In stock yes.
These are the basics but your item will still not show in Magento. You need to assign the product to your website, or store view even if you only have 1 website/view. This is by using the catalogue, products menu, ticking the box by the product and updating attributes then using the websites option.
I found a detailed explanation of it here: how to display products in Magento and assign products to a store view. They also show a video on where to click if you are not sure what to do.
This is another example of the strange quirks of Magento and how user unfriendly it is. Now we know how to do it and have a product in better shape, lets export the file.
System> Import/Export Profiles>Export All Products>Run Profile
The file is found on the server var/export.
The first product should now have all the values in the columns set up correctly so its simple a case of copy and pasting those values in excel.
My changes to copy and paste down the columns are :
B websites
T status, U tax_class_id, V is_recurring, W visibilty, X eenable_googlecheckout
As these are helpfully together in one block we can copy the whole row from T to X and paste is downwards. I changed all mine to:
Enabled Taxable Goods No Catalog, Search Yes
I have also taken this opportunity to once again paste the stock quantity in from the Zencart file. Ensure the is_in_stock column is all set to 1.
Save the file then re-import it as shown in previously in part 1 importing products to Magento from Zencart.
Products should now be in stock, enblesd, searchalble and showing on your site.
Next I shall be making categories and assigning products to categories using the same export/edit/import method.