Basic Contact Importing

The system is able to import contacts into customer address books from a variety of formats. This tutorial will take you through the process of importing a basic CSV file containing contacts which applies to most cases.

Examine your File

Open the file you have in Notepad or a text editor to check that it looks similar to the illustration. A CSV file is a “Comma Separated Value” file where each line contains one contact and each field is separated by a comma and always in the same order. Often there is a header line at the start. This is the type of file that can be easily exported from Excel. Sometimes you will see quotes around each value and that is fine too.

You will need the following columns in the file for basic importing:

A column for the country code. This is the ISO-3166 code for each country (“CA” for Canada, “US” for the United States, “GB” for the United Kingdom, etc).
A column for the province or state code (at least for Canadian and American addresses). For example, “QC” for Quebec, “NY” for New York, etc.
A column for the city
A column for the Postal Code or ZIP code (for countries where this is used)
A single column for the contact name. If you have separate columns for First and Last names that’s OK as long as they are in that order. You can use Excel to reverse them if necessary.
A single column for the company name.
A single column for each line of the street address.

If your file contains more than 500 contacts, you should use Excel to split the file into parts so that each file contains fewer. The number of contacts you can import at once is determined by your browser and computer specifications so you can experiment.

Create an Address Book

You will need to be impersonating your customer so that when you click on Home | Address Books you see their address books and not your own. (Otherwise you’ll import the contacts into your own account.)

Click New Address Book to create the new book for imports

You should create a new address book for the import in case you need to repeat the process. This way you can delete the entire address book in one step.

In Home | Address Books click New Address Book and label it appropriately.

Importing the Contacts

Then in Home | Address Books click Import Contacts to begin.

The next page will ask you to select the target address book and select the format. In this tutorial we will be using the “Customer CSV” format which will suit most cases. Only use one of the other formats if you know your file is in exactly that format.

Choose your target address book and select Custom CSV

Upload the file and click Submit to proceed.

You will now see a table containing all the entries in this file. If the file is large, this may take some time. Remember to split large files into 500 to 1000 contacts at a time.

The initial screen showing the contact import data

In this page you will need to assign a label to each column of data you wish to import. You do this by scrolling to the column and clicking the drop-down at the top then selecting the appropriate field.

Make sure you use Country Code and Province Code

Important Columns: Always select Country Code for the two character country code column. You don’t need to use the “Country” column. Always select Province Code for the two character province or state column. You don’t need to use the “Province” column.

Un-check any lines you don’t want to import such as the header.