How to Import Products from a Spreadsheet into FLUF Connect

When a spreadsheet is the right route

FLUF Connect has two ways to build your catalogue. If you already sell somewhere, you connect that marketplace or store and your live listings are read in — no file involved, and it is both faster and more accurate because the data has already been through a marketplace’s own validation. That route is covered in importing your listings.

The spreadsheet route is for stock that is not listed anywhere yet. In practice that means a shop’s back-room inventory, a wholesale delivery, a house clearance or estate lot, a warehouse of returns, a maker’s production run, or a catalogue that currently lives in a system FLUF Connect does not connect to directly. In all of those cases there is nothing to read from a channel, and a file is the only sensible way in.

It is also the route for anyone leaving an inventory system that is not a marketplace — Linnworks, a bespoke stock database, an accountant’s spreadsheet. There is no direct connector for those, but every one of them can export a CSV.

The three file routes

CSV

The most common route and the most predictable. Any system that holds product data can produce one. If yours produces something malformed, the repair step below will usually deal with it.

Excel (.xlsx or.xls)

Upload the workbook directly — there is no need to convert it to CSV first, which removes a step where formatting is routinely lost. FLUF Connect reads the first worksheet.

One behaviour worth knowing, because it prevents a genuinely nasty accident: if you have filtered the sheet, the rows you filtered out are recognised as hidden and are not imported. Excel marks filtered rows as hidden in the file itself, and a naive reader would import all of them. So if you filter 5,000 rows down to the 194 you actually want and upload that, you get 194 products, not 5,000.

Google Sheets

Paste the Sheet’s URL. The Sheet has to be shared as “Anyone with the link can view” — FLUF Connect reads it from that link rather than asking for access to your Google account, which means you are not granting a third party standing permission to your Drive. If sharing is not set correctly you get a clear error saying so rather than an empty import.

This is the most convenient route when more than one person maintains the stock list, because you can keep editing the Sheet and re-import rather than re-exporting a file each time.

Mapping your columns

You do not need to rename anything or match a template. After the file is read, you tell FLUF Connect which of your columns holds the title, which holds the price, which holds the photographs, and so on. A column called “Item Name”, “product_title” or “Description Short” all work equally well — the mapping is yours to define.

Custom fields you have defined on your own account are mappable targets too. That matters more than it sounds: it means internal data you rely on — bin location, lot number, supplier reference, auction lot, consignor name — comes across attached to the product instead of being flattened away. If it is in your spreadsheet and you have somewhere to put it, it survives the import.

Getting photographs in

Photographs are what a spreadsheet import most often gets wrong, so it is worth deciding your approach before you build the file.

ZIP bundle. Put your images in a ZIP, upload it alongside the spreadsheet, and reference the filenames in an image column. This is the right choice when the photos are on your own machine, which is the usual case for a shop or a clearance.

Image URLs. If your photos are already hosted somewhere — an old store, a supplier’s product feed, a Drive folder with public links — put the URLs in a column instead. This is usually the faster route for wholesale stock, because suppliers generally provide image URLs already.

Multiple images in one cell. If you are putting several image references into a single column, keep the separator consistent throughout the file. Mixed separators inside one column are the most common reason an import produces listings with only the first photograph attached.

The limit is 20 images per listing. The more important constraint is not the ceiling but the floor: a row with no usable photograph produces a listing no marketplace will show well, whatever the rest of the data says. Some channels enforce this outright — Vinted will not accept a listing with fewer than two images. If part of your file has no photos, it is better to import that part later than to import it blank.

When your file is broken

Spreadsheets exported from other systems are frequently malformed, and usually in ways that are invisible until something fails. FLUF Connect detects and repairs the common cases:

• The wrong delimiter — semicolons or tabs where commas were expected, which is standard behaviour for European locale exports and turns an entire file into one column.
• Mangled characters — accented and non-English characters arriving as unreadable symbols because the file was saved in the wrong encoding.
• Rows with too many columns — usually caused by an unescaped comma or quote inside a description field, which pushes every value after it into the wrong place.

You can download the corrected file afterwards, which is worth doing — it gives you a clean copy for your own records and for any future import, rather than repeating the same repair every time.

Limits and what to do about them

The safe way to run your first import

1. Import ten rows first. Cut your file down to a handful, run it, and look at the results. Ten minutes here saves an afternoon later.
2. Check the photographs specifically. Data errors are obvious in a listings view; missing or wrongly matched images are the failure people notice last.
3. Then run the full file. Once ten rows come out right, five thousand will too, because it is the same mapping.
4. Use undo if it is wrong. Reversing the import in one action is always better than deleting products by hand, and it leaves nothing behind.
5. Crosslist a small batch before automating. Push ten products to one destination and check them on the marketplace before turning on rules that will push thousands.

Large imports also produce a progress link you can share with someone else, which is useful when a member of staff is running the import and you want to follow it without logging in.

After the import

Once products exist in FLUF Connect it makes no difference how they got there. A product created from a spreadsheet behaves exactly like one read in from a marketplace: you select it, choose destination channels, and it is crosslisted. From then on inventory sync keeps stock in step across the channels you pushed it to, and auto-relisting and offer management apply where the destination channel supports them.

If you imported cost prices, they feed profit reporting. If you did not, there is a separate CSV round-trip for bulk editing that lets you export your listings, add costs across thousands of rows in a spreadsheet, and upload it again to apply them. That path updates products rather than creating them, so it is the tool for filling in data after the fact — see bulk operations.

Pricing

Every new account starts with a 7-day trial for £1 with full access. There is no free plan after that; the entry plan is Starter at £9/month, with no cap on how much you list, and the full automation feature set.

Automatic relisting, offer management and smart pricing are included from Seller upwards. Starter covers unlimited crosslisting, inventory sync and order sync without them. Yearly billing is charged once a year. There is no free plan. New accounts get 7 days for £1, then move onto a plan.

Product limits count unsold, active products, so items that have sold do not count against your allowance. Full detail is on the pricing page.

Related guides

This page sits in the FLUF Connect guides hub. Start at importing your listings for the overview of both routes in, or read selling on multiple platforms for the operating side once your catalogue is in. If you are moving from another crosslisting tool, switching crosslisting tools covers that case, which needs no file at all.

Sources & Verification

Last verified: 2026-08-15. Please contact us if any detail here is out of date.

1. FLUF Connect import overview — both routes into the catalogue and what transfers on each.
2. FLUF Connect integrations page — the live list of channels, connection types and per-channel image requirements.
3. FLUF Connect pricing page — plan prices and annual billing.