Quick order and cart import
A professional buyer with a parts list in front of them does not want your category tree. They want a box to paste forty article numbers into. Quick order — Fast Product Entry, Schnellerfassung — is that box, and cart import is the same idea with a file.
Why this matters more than it looks
A B2B buyer arrives with the article numbers already decided: from a drawing, from their ERP's reorder proposal, from last year's order. Every screen you make them pass through is friction that a phone call to your Innendienst avoids.
Quick order is also the single feature that moves telephone and fax orders online. A buyer who can paste their list in twenty seconds stops sending the fax — and that is the actual business case for the shop, not the product pages.
The two shapes
| Shape | What the buyer does |
|---|---|
| Quick order form | Types or pastes SKU and quantity pairs into a form in your storefront |
| Cart import | Uploads a file — typically CSV exported from their own system |
Both end in the same place: lines in a cart, priced with the buyer's own prices, ready for a normal checkout.
Import and export profiles
What a file is allowed to look like is defined by an import/export profile. Find them under Order Management › Carts › Import/export.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
name | What the profile is called |
direction | import or export |
entity | carts or cart_items — a whole cart, or only its lines |
format | json or csv |
mapping | Column mapping: each entry maps a column in the file to a field |
apply_mode | insert, append or replace |
apply_mode is the one to get right:
appendadds the file's lines to what is already in the cart. Identical product lines merge and quantities accumulate.replaceswaps the cart's contents for the file. Set semantics — whatever was there is gone.insertcreates.
For a buyer's quick-order upload, append is almost always what they expect. A
buyer who uploads a second file and finds the first one gone will not upload a
third.
The templates that ship
Four profiles are seeded on install:
| Profile | What it is for |
|---|---|
cart-export-json | Canonical export — re-importable, loses nothing |
cart-export-csv | Spreadsheet export for a human |
cart-import-json | The canonical import |
cart-import-csv | The quick-order shape: sku,name,quantity,unit_price |
Start from cart-import-csv and adjust the mapping to match what your customers'
systems actually export. Restore templates on the same screen brings the
defaults back if you need a clean reference.
The CSV rules that decide whether it works
The same rules that break product imports break cart imports, for the same reasons:
- UTF-8. Excel's default CSV export on Windows often is not, and it is what
turns
GrößeintoGröße. - Leading zeros. Excel eats them. A SKU of
0041711becomes41711and matches nothing. Format the column as text before typing anything. - Decimal separator.
10,5read as a thousands separator becomes105. Quantities are the field where this hurts. - Exact SKUs. The article number has to be the one in your catalogue, not a variant of it with a different separator.
The same ground is covered in more detail in Prepare your import file — the mechanics are identical.
Customer article numbers
The common request behind quick order is: our customers order against their own article numbers, not yours. Two honest answers:
- Order lists carry it. A list position holds the buyer's own article number alongside your SKU, so a buyer ordering from their maintained list sees their number. See Order lists and recurring carts.
- A cross-reference in the catalogue. If buyers must be able to paste their numbers into a fresh quick-order box, those numbers have to be searchable article data — an attribute on the product, or a reference entity. That is a catalogue modelling decision, not a cart setting. See Attributes.
Which price the upload gets
A cart line carries the price it was created with, and the price the catalogue says now. Which one an order is booked on is a tenant setting — snapshot or current — and it matters most exactly here: an uploaded cart sitting for two weeks over a price change is the case the setting exists for. See Checkout configuration.
What to check
Run one real file through, then open the cart under Order Management › Carts:
- Every line arrived, and the count matches the file.
- SKUs matched — a line that came in as an unrecognised article is the loudest possible signal that your leading zeros are gone.
- Quantities are right, including any with decimals.
- Prices resolved to the buyer's prices, not to list prices — Check which price a buyer sees if they did not.
- Umlauts are intact in the line names.
Test with ten rows before you tell a customer the feature exists. Always.
Next
- Order lists and recurring carts — the saved version of the same idea.
- Punchout explained — when the buyer never visits your shop at all.