Making product imports faster
An import that takes a few minutes for a thousand products can take hours for a hundred thousand. Long imports delay price updates, overlap with the next scheduled run and sometimes fail halfway. Most of the time is lost in a few predictable places, and each of them can be improved.
Send only what changed
Re-uploading every product on every run is the most common cause of slow updates. Prices and stock change daily; names, descriptions and images rarely. Updating only prices and quantities for existing products, and full data only for new ones, can cut the time dramatically.
Handle images separately
Downloading and uploading images is far slower than updating text fields. Upload images once when the product is created and refresh them only when the supplier's image link changes.
Work in batches
Store platforms accept updates in batches more efficiently than one product at a time. Batch size has to respect the platform's limits: too large and requests fail, too small and you waste time on overhead.
Respect rate limits
APIs of store platforms and suppliers limit the number of requests. Hitting the limit causes pauses or errors. Spread requests evenly and avoid running several heavy processes against the same API at once.
Keep supplier files lean
- Ask suppliers for a version of the file without fields you do not use.
- If a supplier offers a separate "stock and price only" feed, use it for frequent updates and the full feed less often.
- Prefer a direct link to the file over e-mail attachments, which add delay.
Schedule at quiet times
Large updates run faster when the store is not busy serving customers. Early morning is usually the best window.
Remove dead weight
Products that have not been available from any supplier for months still take time on every run. Archive them, and the import gets faster for everyone.
Find the bottleneck
Measure each stage separately: downloading supplier files, processing, exporting to the store. Optimising the wrong stage changes nothing.
How YfiFX approaches it
YfiFX processes supplier price lists on its own servers, so the heavy work of reading files, linking products and recalculating prices does not load your store. It handles catalogs from a few dozen to millions of items in supplier price lists, and the import, processing and export chain runs on a schedule you choose, typically at quiet hours.
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