Importing Shipping Charges into Ecwid

Ecwid is a great e-commerce service, but setting up complex shipping charges is time consuming. There is no way to copy all your hard work from one shop to another without laboriously typing in all the data again.

One day, the hard working Ecwid team may support import/export of shipping data, but until they do, there is another solution.

Use the Selenium IDE plugin for Firefox to automate the data entry.

This article provides a spreadsheet that generates the Selenium script for setting up Royal Mail postal charges. You can simply copy, modify if you like, then paste the generated script into the Selenium IDE window, click run, and watch the table being entered into Ecwid.

What you need

This spreadsheet

Selenium IDE Firefox Extension

The Details

First, you need to be using FireFox.

Go to the Selenium site and download the Selenium IDE extension. This will automatically install into Firefox. (See how)

Copy and customise the spreadsheet

This Google Docs spreadsheet can be used as a base for your own shipping tables. It contains three tables based on Royal Mail services:

• UK 1st Class Packet
• EU Small Packet
• Rest of World Small Packet

You can specify packaging costs and weights for up to 5 different total product weight ranges, and the sheet will adjust the Ecwid weight ranges and charges accordingly.

You may also specify values for the other Ecwid fields if you need to.

If you use Google Docs, just make a copy of this sheet. (File > make a copy)

If not, you can save it for Excel or OpenOffice. (File > Download as...)

Using the spreadsheet

There are several pairs of sheets. Each pair has a main settings sheet, and a corresponding script generation sheet.

First, open the main settings sheet e.g. UK settings, and make any adjustments for the packaging materials you use.

Now, open the UK script sheet. Select the yellow script cells and copy to the clipboard.

Check the green fields are what you need, particularly the Zone and Name field. 

If you need to, you may change the other green fileds in the table, but that is normally not necessary.

Using Selenium IDE

First, login to Ecwid and open your Shipping Page as if you were going to update the table manually.

Then, open the Selenium IDE window in Firefox (Tools > Selenium IDE)

Open the Source tab to show the empty "untitled" script, and paste the script you copied from the spreadsheet into the table body.

Play the script

That's it

Save the changes in Ecwid and you're done.

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