Export product data from Magento 2.X

More and more people are shopping online, and to fulfil that demand, more and more businesses are offering billions of products at millions of webshops across the world.
Many webshop administrators tend to get baffled with their product data as their business grows and hence product catalog grows as well. It is not an easy task to manage and edit hundreds and thousands of products in a webshop. Fortunately, Magento realised this obstacle long ago and hence there has always been an Export and Import tool inbuilt into all Magento versions. Magento 2.X is no different. It has its own Export and Import mechanism which can be used for many purposes.

Exporting and going through your product data in an spreadsheet (in MS Excel or Open office) is quickest and easiest way to get an overview of all products in your Magento 2.X webshop.
You can also use this to keep regular backup of your product data. Or it can be used for reporting purposes and many times business also need to copy their product into various other systems like their PIM, ERP or CRM. The exported CSV can also be used a base to create an import CSV, which can be used to mass-update products via the inbuilt import mechanism.

Today we will discuss the standard product export process from Magento 2.X backoffice.

Step 1. Login to your Magento backoffice and go to System > Data transfer > Export

Step 2. In the Export Settings section, you need to select 'Entity Type' as 'Products'
Export File Format should be 'CSV'. There is only CSV format available by default as of now.
We also suggest you tick-select 'Field enclosure'. You can also leave it un-ticked but it helps alot by enclosing any special characters in the data. Ie. this feature will enclose attribute data with with an “escape sequence,”.
Special characters can be regularly used characters like equal sign, greater and less than symbols, single and double quotes, backslash, pipe, and ampersand symbols etc. These special characters can cause issues with data export and import if not properly identified and handled.

Step 3. Next step will list down all products attributes that are there in your webshop. From this list, you can filter out the exact product data that you need in your CSV.
Or you can just export all your product data as well. If you want to do that then jump to Step 5 from here.

Step 4. If you want only a small/selected part of your product data for any specific purpose then that is also possible. To export only products with specific attribute values, you can enter the required value in the Filter column.
To skip a product attribute from your CSV, tick-select the checkbox in 'Exclude' column that you see on the left side of each attribute in the list.
Example: If you want to export only the SKU and product description values of your products, then you need to select the checkbox of all other attribute and leave the SKU and Description attributes un-ticked. Note that all the attribute columns will still appear in the exported CSV file, but those columns will be empty.

Step 5. Once you are sure that you have excluded all the attributes that you do not need, you need to go down to the bottom of the page and click on 'Continue' button that is there.
Once you click this button, a CSV file will be automatically downloaded to your local machine via your browser.
You can then further open this downloaded product CSV file using editors like Notepad++ or MS Excel or Open Office. As mentioned above, you can even use the CSV to edit your product info. and then import it back into the webshop.

In a standard Magento 2.X build, following product attributes will be exported by default:

sku,store_view_code, attribute_set_code, product_type, categories, product_websites, name, description, short_description, weight,product_online, tax_class_name, visibility, price, special_price, special_price_from_date, special_price_to_date, url_key, meta_title, meta_keywords, meta_description, base_image, base_image_label, small_image, small_image_label, thumbnail_image, thumbnail_image_label, swatch_image, swatch_image_label, created_at, updated_at, new_from_date, new_to_date, display_product_options_in, map_price, msrp_price, map_enabled, gift_message_available, custom_design, custom_design_from, custom_design_to, custom_layout_update, page_layout, product_options_container, msrp_display_actual_price_type, country_of_manufacture, additional_attributes, qty, out_of_stock_qty, use_config_min_qty, is_qty_decimal, allow_backorders, use_config_backorders, min_cart_qty, use_config_min_sale_qty, max_cart_qty, use_config_max_sale_qty, is_in_stock, notify_on_stock_below, use_config_notify_stock_qty, manage_stock, use_config_manage_stock, use_config_qty_increments, qty_increments, use_config_enable_qty_inc, enable_qty_increments, is_decimal_divided, website_id, related_skus, related_position, crosssell_skus, crosssell_position, upsell_skus, upsell_position, additional_images, additional_image_labels, hide_from_product_page, custom_options, bundle_price_type, bundle_sku_type, bundle_price_view, bundle_weight_type, bundle_values, bundle_shipment_type, configurable_variations, configurable_variation_labels, associated_skus

Of-course there will be more attributes in the exported CSV if you have added your own attributes while creating your products.

That is all there is to know about standard product export mechanism in Magento 2.X.

Feel free to contact Hungersoft if you need any kind of assistance with developing, maintaining or running your webshops.