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Import of CSV and Excel files to drafts
Import of CSV and Excel files to drafts

Import CSV or Excel files containing receiver information and speed up booking of your shipments.

Tea Krestine Johansen avatar
Written by Tea Krestine Johansen
Updated over a week ago

You can import your customers' delivery information through CSV or Excel files.
These will be imported into Drafts and then you'll be able to use this information to book shipments for your orders with just a few clicks.

Introduction

Our CSV-file import is a flexible function that allows you to set up the fields yourself and populate them with the missing information during import.

We recommend that you work with an Excel file, as it is the easiest to work with.
As there is a number of systems that only support export to CSV, this format is supported as well.


CSV file
An example of a CSV file containing one address line:

name,address,zip code,city,country,e-mail,mobile,order_id
"James Woods","20 Stork Rd",E7 9HR,"London",GB,james.w@email.com,12345678,1337

Click here to download a CSV test file.

Excel file

An example of an Excel file containing one address line:

Click here to download an Excel test file.

How to import a file

The import procedure is the same for both CSV and Excel files.

We're using a CSV file in the guide below.

1 Upload file

Go to Shipments > Drafts > Plus - in right corner.

Select a file from your computer that you've prepared for import.

Select encoding (only required by CSV): Select the encoding of your file. The encoding depends on the program used to generate the file. If in doubt, try it out. Our CSV file has a "UTF-8" encoding, so we're choosing that one.

Choose field separator (only required by CSV): Select how the data in the file is separated. In our CSV file, the separator is comma ",".

File contains column headers: Select whether the top line is a heather (wether the first line contains a description of the fields). In our CSV file, the first line is a heather.

When the choices are made, click on Next.

2 Field setup

A new window, which you can see below, will pop up now. In this step you'll have the option of choosing which columns from your file should be used for filling out different fields. This data will be used for creating shipments later on.

There is both a dropdown and a text input by each field. Dropdown displays column header from your CSV file.

You'll also be able to populate each field manually.
If you choose to type something in the text input field, this will be used instead of a field from the file and will be applied to all imported drafts. This is often used for sender information.

As there is no sender information in our CSV example file, these fields will be filled out manually.

Below is an example of how the configuration can be made:

  • Receiver information and order ID is imported from our CSV file

  • Sender information has been entered in the text input fields manually

  • Template ID is also specified manually and refers to a shipment template being used for the shipment creation (a preset data including carrier, shipping product, weight class and additional services). You can fint your Template ID in the top menu, under Shipments > Templates.

Note! Once you've filled in alle the information, you can save this configuration as a mapping for later use. This means that you can reuse the setup the next time you have to import a same format CSV file. Save this configuration by clicking on the Saved mappings > Save mapping.

Click on Next.

3 Import into Drafts

The system will now import data from your CSV file and you will get a confirmation (Receipt) when it's done.

4 Booking of shipments based on imported Drafts

You can find the addresses you've just imported under Shipments > Drafts.

Select the draft(s) you wish to create shipments for and click on Create Shipments.

A new window will pop up, as shown below.

Choose the printer for your shipping labels and whether the nearest pick-up point should be chosen automatically.

Then tick the box I accept terms and conditions and click on Create.

Once your shipments have been created, you'll be able to see them under Shipments > Booked.

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