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Tutorial created by Ray Borduin, WebAssist

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Every once in a while an entry in your product catalog comes along that's just… just so beautiful, you know? So perfect that when you close your eyes you can almost see its producty face inanimately not looking back at you, smiling, except for the fact that it doesn't have a face. A product catalog entry so great, that you don't believe in a million years you could duplicate it.

Well guess what buster; if you use CafeCommerce you can. This tutorial is going to show you the bee's kneesiest way to go about creating an exact duplicate of a product in your catalog without the manual grind of adding each and every thing into a new entry. This way also retains that sparkle that your beloved product catalog entry has.

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Export your existing catalog

In this step, we're going to export your existing product catalog into a .csv file that we can later open in Microsoft Excel.

Log into your CafeCommerce admin
Go to your Dashboard (youraccountname.mycafecommerce.com/admin/store/dashboard.php)
Make sure the Store tab is selected
Click the Import/Export button
Under Export, set the File Format to CSV (.csv)
Select Products from the Data to include options
Click the Export button

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Duplicate the product

Open the .csv file that was just created in Mircosoft Excel
Locate the row for the product you want to duplicate
Click the row number to highlight the entire row
Click Edit > Copy or CTRL+C in Windows or Command+C in OS X
Right click on the row number of the top product in the list
This should be row number 2
Click Insert Copied Cells
Under the Product ID column, change the Product ID for the newly duplicated product to an ID that isn't being used
This lets CafeCommerce know this product isn't currently in your store, and will let it know to add it.
Repeat steps 2- for each product you want to add to your catalog
Save your .csv file

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Import the updated catalog

This section is for users with existing CafeCommerce accounts that are currently using a payment gateway.

Log into your CafeCommerce admin
Go to your Dashboard (youraccountname.mycafecommerce.com/admin/store/dashboard.php)
Make sure the Store tab is selected
Click the Import/Export button
Click the Choose File button for the Select .CSV file field
Locate the .csv file with the duplicated products
Select the file
Click the Import button

What to do next

And there you have it. CafeCommerce will only add the products to the catalog that have new IDs (hence the reason we changed the IDs on the duplicated products) and leave any untouched that have existing IDs. The next step for you is to duplicate a million products! Well, only if you need to duplicate a million products, that is. If you don't, you're pretty much all set.

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