Importing customers
Your customers live in an address book, a shop’s export or a spreadsheet you kept by hand. The customers import creates one customer per row, ready to appear on a sales order. The upload, mapping and per-row checks work the same for every import kind; see CSV imports for that flow. You reach it from the Import menu on the Customers page, which exists once your plan includes customers and sales orders.
Columns
Section titled “Columns”| Field | Required | What goes in it |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Yes | The customer’s name, e.g. “Marketside Grocery” |
| Contact | No | The person you deal with |
| No | Their email address; a malformed one flags the row | |
| Phone | No | Their phone number, as written |
| Address | No | One address, as written. A multi-line address survives inside a quoted cell |
| Notes | No | Anything worth keeping, on one line |
| Market | No | The country code of one of your markets, e.g. FR. Blank means your home market |
The Market column is read only when your plan includes markets, and only a market you have already declared counts: a code naming none flags the row with “Unknown market.” Declare it under Settings → Markets first, or clear the cell to import the customer at home.
Common header names map on their own: “client” finds Name, “mail” finds Email. Anything else you match by hand under Column mapping.
Names you already have
Section titled “Names you already have”A shared name is not the same person. Two shops are called “Le Comptoir” and a great many people are called Jean Martin, so a name already in your records never holds a row back. It is flagged instead, quietly: “A customer already has this name. This row imports as its own customer; map it to them if it is the same one.” Leave it alone and you get a second record, which is the honest answer when nothing but a name says the two are one.
An email address is a stronger signal, since almost nobody shares an inbox. A row whose address one of your customers already uses says so in the same way, naming the address rather than the name.
Archived customers are not matched at all: importing a name you archived creates a new customer. Restore the old one first if that is what you meant.
Repeats inside the file are flagged as duplicates on the whole row, not on the name: “Jean Martin, jean@a.com” and “Jean Martin, jean@b.com” are two people and both belong in the file.
Mapping a row to a customer you already have
Section titled “Mapping a row to a customer you already have”When the row really is a customer you already have, Map to customer on the row says so, and mapping means merge. Open Fix first: under “What importing this row would change”, each differing field is on one line, what you have on the left and what the file says on the right. Import to take the file’s values, correct them in the editor before you do, or press Skip this row to leave the record as it is. A blank cell in the file never clears anything you already had.
A mapped row whose values you already carry has nothing to write. It is marked Skipped, which is an outcome and not a problem to fix; a file is finished when every row is either imported or skipped.
What a row creates
Section titled “What a row creates”A customer, and one address when the column is filled. Nothing else: no orders, no prices, no wholesale mark. The market rides along when the column names one. Set the wholesale mark and any further addresses on the customer’s page afterwards. A history of what the customer bought comes from past sales or from the sales orders you record from now on.