Argh!! Seriously? (As Bryan is pulling his hair out.)
As anyone might guess after reading other forum posts of mine, I'm usually very pro-Zoho, I'm a huge fan of Zoho, I think it's a good company with good people and have a good product.
But I really have to rant about this. And not just this specific issue, but in a more general sense... The fact isthat there are a range of artificial limitations imposed on doing any sort of bulk editing... and it virtually makes my head explode. Among them are things like...
You can't upload over 1MB at a time in Commerce. (Why make it take five times as long for me to do something that I have to do?)
You can't overwrite any field with a null value - so you can never clear a value through an import. Seriously. You can't. There are so many reasons you'd want to do this, but you can't.
There are a variety of other gems that also result in imports being virtually useless for performing inventory updates.
And so now you can't add variants for an existing product through an import?
Nearly every time I need to do an import to make corrections, I can't because of an artificially imposed restriction. Nearly every time. And I can't be alone in this regard.
There is no need for this. And it's the case in Commerce, Books, and Inventory - so it's seemingly a systemic policy driven issue that I don't experience with other SaaS providers. This is unique to Zoho.
If the concern is that someone who doesn't know what they're doing will wipe out their Inventory with the wrong import, I get that. But we're all adults here. And for those who know how to manage inventory imports, exports, and updates, there needs to be a range of unrestricted tools that allows more experienced users to not feel like they're being forced to drive 20MPH on a 65MPH road.
But these aren't things limited to the needs of advanced users. You don't need to be doing anything out of the norm for this to be an issue. In fact is that the use cases are endless.
Suppose I'm a shoe store and I sell Converse shoes (only the best and most timeless shoe in history) and Converse decides to add a 12th color to their 11 color line of High Top Chuck Taylors... each one being available in no less that 73 different sizes between an infant 1C and an adult Mens 18. (Perhaps there's some overlap between the Big Kids and Adult sizes, but I digress). My point is that it becomes a very unnecessarily time-consuming and ends up being a multi-hour project to expand pre-existing product with new variants. Suppose you wanted to change the name of a color. Show me a way to do that quickly. Why is it that the only available option in cases like these is to manually enter new SKUs manually one by one.
And it would be one thing if Commerce was held back by a technical reason for these things... but let's be real here. There's no technical reason that should inhibit make bulk edits in the system. These restrictions are, for whatever reason, policy driven.
Similar to the one megabyte import limitation restriction (which still is just as unfathomable to me as to why that should exists) I'd love to know what logic would dictate that it would be a good idea to put an absolutely unnecessary limitation like this into Commerce? There is simply no reason for this to exist, other than to drag out something much longer that any other system would allow you to accomplish in second. Amazon, Shopify, etc... simply import your data. They just do.
Why the unnecessary roadblocks that only serve to slow you down when the system should be designed in every way to optimize save me time, rather than making every inventory update into a project.
Please please please fix this so that inventory imports can be a useful part of Commerce. Please. Manual editing in Commerce has sucked countless hours from my life because of this. I'm not kidding. Please fix this so we can actually work with our store inventory efficiently and in a manner that's accommodate by virtually every other available ecommerce solution.
-Bryan