What is the most common process for importing products?
Does everyone use the product import/export tool?
The CSV file format is not something that the client is likely to fill in and if they try it is 99 percent guaranteed that they will get it wrong.
Do most people write there own scripts for this or do they manually create the import CSV file in the format that is required for it to work?
Best Answer
We are using the SOAP API pretty often. It may not be feature complete but you can optimise the data exchange between external systems (ERP, CRM, ...) by optimising existing calls or writing your own one for special needs (e.g. only update a single attribute of a product without loading the complete product etc.).
If your clients don't like the CSV format (I can understand that!) you could define your own file and data format. The client sends his data in this format, a script of yours translates it into an PHP array and uses FastSimpleImport, a special adapter for the ImportExport module.