Import customers and past orders

Bring your customers and order history from your old shop with two CSV files – checked before anything is saved.

Moving to YNS from another shop? You can bring your customers and your past orders with you. Customers keep their saved addresses and wishlists and can sign in with their email, and your team can look up every old order – including by its old order number.

You prepare a CSV file in our template, upload it, and YNS checks the whole file first. Nothing is saved until every row is right.

Tip: Ask Elliot. Attach the CSV file in the AI Assistant chat and ask it to import the file. Elliot checks it, tells you which rows to fix, and imports it once you approve.

What gets imported

Customers (customers.csv, one row per customer):

  • Email, name, language, gender and date of birth
  • A shipping and a billing address, with company name and VAT number – each becomes the customer's default address
  • Wishlist items (by SKU)
  • Newsletter consent – an address that already unsubscribed stays unsubscribed

Orders (orders.csv, one row per order line):

  • The order number, date, status (including one of your own statuses by name), payment method and notes
  • Billing and shipping addresses
  • The products bought, matched to your catalog by SKU (or by exact product name for a product without variants), with the price the customer paid and its VAT rate. A product you no longer sell is kept on the order as a plain line, with its name, SKU and price
  • Orders in another currency, at the prices the customer paid in it
  • Delivery, the coupon code and discount, the tracking number and parcel locker
  • Refunds, as part of the order's history

What does not happen

Imported orders are history. Importing them does not:

  • Email your customers – neither about their account nor about their orders
  • Change your stock
  • Create invoices
  • Send the orders to connected apps such as BaseLinker

Step 1: Download the template

  1. Go to Customers (or Orders) and click Import.
  2. Click Download the template.
  3. Fill it in, or export the data from your old shop and rename the columns to match.

Leave a cell empty when you don't have the value. Dates without a time are fine (2024-03-01), and prices can use a decimal comma (49,20). In orders.csv, an order with several products takes several rows with the same order_number – the order's own columns only need filling in on its first row.

Import customers before orders, so every order lands on the right customer.

Step 2: Check the file

  1. Click Choose CSV file and pick your file.
  2. For orders, choose whether they are Live orders or Test orders, and whether to Keep the old order numbers (see below).
  3. Click Check file.

YNS checks every row. If anything is wrong – a SKU that matches more than one product, a total that doesn't add up, an order number that is already used – you see the row numbers and what to fix. Nothing is imported. Fix the rows and upload the file again.

Some rows only get a note and still import: a product that is no longer in your catalog (it becomes a plain line), or a total that is a grosz or two off because of VAT rounding (YNS keeps the total the customer paid next to the order).

Step 3: Import

When the check passes, click Import. A progress bar shows how far it has got. Keep the tab open until it finishes; you also get an email with the result.

If the import stops partway, the rows already imported stay. Upload the same file again – everything that is already in your store is skipped.

Old order numbers

By default each imported order gets the next YNS order number, and you can still find it by its old number in the order search. If you'd rather keep the old numbers, tick Keep the old order numbers. This works best in a store that has no orders yet: each number must be a whole number not used in your store, and new orders continue after the highest one.

Customers who already have a YNS account

Some of your customers may already shop at another YNS store with the same email. For them, the import adds the customer to your store without touching their account; they are linked the next time they sign in to your store. Their saved addresses and wishlist from your file are not added – you see a note for these rows.

For developers

The same import is available through the API: POST /api/v1/customers/import and POST /api/v1/orders/import take up to 1,000 customers or 500 orders per request, with a dryRun option for the check. See the Customers and Orders API reference.