There might be situations when you will need to export or import customers. In order to do this you will have to go to Administration > Customers and choose the appropriate link.

Export

In terms of customer account export ViArt CMS offers three options:

• export all customers;
• export new customers;
• export selected customers.

Export all customers. The system will export all existing customers.

Export new customers. The system will export only the customers that have registered since the last exporting.

Export selected customers. The system will export only the ticked off orders. Note that the option becomes available only if at least one customer is selected.

Regardless of what option you choose the exporting process is almost the same. Follow the instructions below:

• Decide what customers you want to export and make the system show them.
• Click the corresponding link. Notice the number in brackets indicating how many customers you are going to export.
• Select the fields containing information about customers you want to export.

Note: Keep in mind using custom fields - extra fields containing some new information or the same data as the predefined fields but with different format. You can enter some text (in such a case all customers will have the same value for this field) or you can use special tags (in order to see the full list of available tags click the 'click here to see all available tags you can use in your custom field' link).

• Select the file format. There are three file formats supported: delimited by comma, delimited by tab and delimited by semicolon.
• Click the 'Export' button and save the file.

Import

In case you have already a number of customers, you might want to import some information about them into the web-site database. Click the 'Import Users' link; your screen should look like the following:

Here you have to provide the full path to the CSV file containing the data and specify its format. The system supports three file formats: delimited by comma, delimited by tab and delimited by semicolon.

Click the 'Upload' button. You will see two columns where you have to match the values in your CSV file with the database ones. If you have already imported some data, you can use the previous settings (tick off the 'You can match the columns with previous import by ticking this checkbox' check box).

Note: In case you have some extra fields (for example, a custom field), they will be displayed along with the predefined ones. However, you cannot import them unless you ignore some of the predefined fields.

If necessary, tick off the check box if the first row of your CSV file contains data and specify whether you want the system to show all the data before proceed or to import them immediately.

Click the 'Continue' button. The system will compare the existing set of customer accounts with the data in the CSV file and generate a resulting table where every customer account is assigned one of the following statuses:

• New means that this customer account doesn't exist in the system database and you can easily import it.
• Error means that some data doesn't match with the database columns and you have to correct it.
• Exists means that the same customer account already exists in the system database.

Tick off the check boxes of the accounts you want to import and click the 'Import' button. Note that you cannot import accounts with the 'Error' status.

The system will import the data and show you the results.