Duplicate Products - What to do after you upgrade from V3 to V4

This FAQ will help explain the differences in how ezimerchant Pro handles products between V3 and V4 - and more specifically, what you need to know about duplicated products after upgrading.

V3 Senario:

You have a new product called 'Epic Coin Tray' with a product code of 'ECT'. You add it into ezimerchant into the 'Coins' Category. You also want to display this new product in the 'Specials' category - so you duplicate the product exactly in the 'Specials' category.

In the ezimerchant database you have effectively created two seperate identical products. This is inefficient and requires double data entry.

This is what the two categories would look like:

V4 Differences:

In V4 the duplication of a product in the database is not necessary and no longer possible as ezimerchant Pro V4 enforces unique product codes.

This means that a product code can only exist once in the database.

However this does not mean that a product can only exist in one place. In V4 you can assign a product to more than a single category.

The upgrade process:

Due to V4 requiring unique product codes it must look through your database and identify any products in the database with the same product code and modify them so they become unique.

For our example above, ezimerchant will find two products with the same code.

The first product will be left alone. The second product will have its product code renamed to make it unique.
Example:

Product 1 before upgrade
Code: 'ECT'

Product 1 after upgrade
Code 'ECT'

Product 2 before upgrade
Code 'ECT'

Product 2 after upgrade
Code 'ECT-DUP1'

If more instances of this product existed you would find that ezimerchant would continue to rename the product codes with consecutive numbers.

Example: 'ECT-DUP2' , 'ECT-DUP3' etc etc.

After the upgrade:

After the upgrade your ezimerchant Pro should look like this:

What to do after the upgrade:

We now need to identify where the duplicate products are and delete them and then assign the untouched product to the categories where we deleted the duplicates.

So, we should delete the duplicate product from the 'Coins' category.

You should now be left with this:

Now all that is left to do is to assign the 'ECT' product from the 'Specials' category to the 'Coins' category.

The following window will then appear:

Select the 'Coins' category from the list and click OK. You should see the following:

You have now removed the product duplication that was present in V3 and assigned a single product to multiple categories.

This process needs to be repeated for all the duplicated products in your database. This is a time consuming task, however it only needs to be done once.

Now that you have finished removing duplicates you can enjoy the benefits such as:

• When you edit the product it updates in all the categories that it is assigned.
• Database is smaller and more efficient.
• Its very quick to assign a single product to multiple categories.
• No more double data entry!