Upload Your Whole Cut Sheet in One Go

There is a spreadsheet on your farm right now that already knows everything your online store needs to know. It has your cuts, your weights, your prices, the ribeye and the ground beef and the soup bones, forty lines of it, sitting in a file the processor emailed you or a sheet you have kept for years. Product import is the feature that takes that file and turns it into your live catalogue in a single upload — no retyping, no forty separate forms, no lost evening. You already did the work in the spreadsheet. Farm To Net just finishes the job.

If you have ever sat down to put your products online and felt the dread of it — the mental math of "forty cuts, two minutes each, that's over an hour of typing before I've even added a photo" — this is the feature that erases that dread. Bulk product import is not a power-user convenience buried in a settings menu. It is the front door to your whole store, the fastest path from "I have a price list" to "I am open for business," and it is included from the very first plan. Upload the sheet, preview what will happen, commit it, and your catalogue is live.

The setup problem every farm hits before its first sale

Every direct-to-consumer meat farm faces the same wall on day one, and it has nothing to do with raising animals. You have the herd, the processing dates, the prices worked out to the penny. What you do not have is a catalogue of forty products typed into a store, one at a time, each with a name, a price, a unit, a category. The store is empty and the work of filling it is exactly the kind of repetitive data entry that farmers have no time for and no patience for. It is the reason so many farms stall out with a beautiful website and nothing to buy on it.

The old ways of getting past that wall are all bad. You can type every product by hand, form after form, checking your spreadsheet against the screen, catching a typo three cuts later and going back. You can hire someone — a virtual assistant, a teenager, a web person — to enter your catalogue for you, and pay them for hours of work you should not have to buy. Or you can give up on the good version, list five products instead of forty, and quietly lose every sale from the customer who wanted the cut you never got around to adding. None of these is how it should work when the information already exists in a file.

CSV product upload collapses that wall. A CSV is just the plain, universal form of a spreadsheet — the format every program on earth can save, from Excel to Google Sheets to the file your processor sends. You export your sheet as a CSV, you upload it, and Farm To Net reads every row as a product. Forty cuts become forty products in the time it takes to choose a file. The wall that stops other farms is a door you walk straight through.

You should never have to type a product into a store when you already typed it into a spreadsheet. The information exists. Moving it should take one upload, not one evening.

How the import actually works, from file to catalogue

The heart of this feature is a farm catalogue import that is built to be forgiving, because the spreadsheets real farms keep are not tidy laboratory files. Your sheet has the columns you have always used. Your prices are the ones you charge. Your product names are the ones your customers know. The importer meets your file where it is rather than demanding you reformat everything first.

You point the importer at your file and it reads the rows. Each row is a product: a name, a price, and whatever else you have chosen to include. Products are matched by name, which is the quiet genius of the whole thing — the importer looks at each row, checks whether a product by that name already exists in your catalogue, and decides accordingly. If the name is new, it creates a new product. If the name already exists, it updates that product instead of making a confusing duplicate. That single rule is what makes the importer safe to use over and over, not just once at the start.

Match-by-name is why the import is not a one-time migration tool you use and forget. It is a living bridge between your spreadsheet and your store. The first time you upload, everything is new, so everything is created. The next time — a season later, when your price list has changed — the same names match the same products, and the importer updates the prices instead of duplicating the catalogue. Your spreadsheet stays the master copy you are comfortable working in, and the store stays in step with it. That is the difference between a tool you touch once and a tool you actually use.

A preview before anything commits

The single most important thing about the Farm To Net importer is that it never surprises you. Before a single change is written to your live store, you see a preview — a clear, plain-language summary of exactly what the upload is about to do. This many products will be created. This many will be updated. These prices will change, from this to that. Nothing about your file is a leap of faith.

This matters more than it might sound. The nightmare scenario with any bulk tool is the one where you upload a file, something is subtly wrong — a column shifted, a decimal in the wrong place — and it silently rewrites your whole catalogue with garbage before you can stop it. Farm To Net makes that impossible by design. The preview is a checkpoint. You read it, you confirm it looks right, and only then do you commit. If the preview shows something you did not expect — a price that looks off, a product being created that should have matched an existing one — you stop, fix the spreadsheet, and upload again. Nothing has touched your live store yet. You are always looking before you leap.

Think of the preview the way you would think of reading a processor's invoice before you pay it. You do not just hand over the money because a number is printed on paper. You check the weights, you check the cut counts, you check the total. The import preview is that same habit, applied to your catalogue: see what will change, confirm it is right, then let it happen.

Bulk price updates: the feature you will use every season

The first upload builds your catalogue. But the reason farmers keep coming back to this feature is the bulk price update, and it is worth understanding on its own. Prices on a farm are not set once and left forever. Feed costs move. A processor raises their rates. A new season starts and last year's numbers no longer make sense. Suddenly you need to change the price on forty products, and the thought of opening forty product pages one at a time is enough to make you leave the old prices up out of sheer avoidance — which quietly costs you money on every sale.

With product import, a full bulk price update is the same motion as the first upload. You open the spreadsheet you already keep — the one with every cut and its price — and you change the prices in the sheet, where changing prices is easy and you can see them all at once. Then you export it and upload it. The importer matches every row to the product it already created by name, sees the new prices, and shows you the preview: forty products, forty price changes, from the old number to the new one, all in one list. You confirm, and your entire catalogue is repriced in seconds. What used to be an hour of dreaded clicking is now a spreadsheet edit and a single upload.

Because the import is safe to re-run, this becomes a seasonal rhythm rather than a scary one-off. New season, new price list, one upload. The store keeps up with your farm without you ever entering a product twice. This is the difference between software that fights you and software that gets out of your way.

From spreadsheet to online store, without leaving the tool you trust

There is a deeper comfort in the spreadsheet to online store workflow that is easy to overlook. Farmers are, almost universally, comfortable in a spreadsheet. It is the one piece of business software nearly everyone already uses — for the herd records, for the processing schedule, for the price list, for the taxes. Asking a farmer to abandon that and manage a catalogue only inside a web interface they have never seen is asking them to give up the tool they trust. Product import says: keep your spreadsheet. Keep working the way you already work. Just upload it when you are ready, and the store will match. You are not learning a new way to manage products. You are pointing your existing way at a store that finally understands it.

Who this is for

Bulk import shows up differently depending on where a farm is starting from. Here are the four farms who feel the relief most.

The farm with a forty-line cut sheet

You raise beef, and a single steer becomes dozens of distinct products — ribeye, New York strip, sirloin, chuck roast, brisket, short ribs, ground, stew meat, soup bones, liver, oxtail, and on and on. Your cut sheet runs forty lines, maybe more, and every one of them is a product a customer might want. Typing forty products into a store by hand is the exact task the human brain rebels against: repetitive, error-prone, and long enough to eat a whole evening. With a cut sheet upload, those forty lines become forty products in one motion. You export the cut sheet you already have, upload it, preview the forty products it is about to create, and confirm. The store that was empty five minutes ago is now a full butcher counter. This is the persona the feature was built for first, and it is the one that reacts with something close to disbelief the first time it works.

The farm migrating from another platform or a spreadsheet

Maybe you are not new to selling online. You have been running your store on another platform, or on a homegrown mix of a page and a spreadsheet, and you are moving to Farm To Net for everything else it does. The last thing you want is to rebuild your entire catalogue from scratch as the price of switching. You should not have to. Most platforms can export your products to a CSV, and your own spreadsheet already is one. Point the importer at that export, and your whole catalogue comes across in a single upload — matched, previewed, committed. Migration stops being the reason you put off switching and becomes a five-minute step. Your history and your hard-won product list come with you; only the software underneath changes.

The farm repricing everything for a new season

You have been open for a year. Your catalogue is built, your customers know your cuts, and now the season has turned and every price needs to move. Feed was more this year; the processor raised rates; you are finally charging what the meat is worth. Forty products need new prices, and you dread it — not because the math is hard but because the clicking is endless. This is the import price list moment. You open your master spreadsheet, adjust every price in the place where adjusting prices is natural, export it, and upload. The importer matches every row to the product you already have and shows you the whole reprice in one preview: old price, new price, forty times over. You confirm, and the new season's prices are live before your coffee is cold. Next season you will do it again, and it will be just as painless.

The farm with a processor's price list in a spreadsheet

Here is the case that feels almost too convenient. Your processor sends you a spreadsheet — a cut list, a price sheet, an inventory of what came back from a hanging carcass. It is already a file, already structured in rows and columns, already the source of truth for what you have to sell. Instead of reading that file and typing its contents into your store, you upload the file itself. A little cleanup — matching the column names, checking the prices are your retail prices and not the processor's charges — and the processor's spreadsheet becomes your live catalogue. The document that used to be the start of hours of data entry is now the entire job. You went from a PDF-and-spreadsheet inbox to a stocked online store without retyping a single cut.

How Farm To Net compares to doing it by hand

It is worth being honest about the alternatives, because every farm has tried at least one of them.

• Typing products one form at a time is the default, and it is brutal at scale. Forty cuts at a couple of minutes each is well over an hour of pure data entry before you have added a single photo or description — and that is if you make no mistakes, which nobody does. Every typo means going back. Every price change later means doing a version of it all over again. Farm To Net replaces the whole hour with one upload and a preview.
• Paying someone to enter your catalogue — a virtual assistant, a web person, a family member — trades your hours for money, but it does not make the work smart. You are still paying by the hour for repetitive typing, you still have to check their work for errors, and when your prices change next season you are back on the phone hiring it out again. Bulk import means you never buy that labor in the first place, and you are never dependent on someone else to change a price.
• Leaving the catalogue thin — listing five products because forty is too much work — is the hidden alternative most farms actually choose, and it is the most expensive. Every cut you did not list is a sale you cannot make. The customer who wanted oxtail or soup bones or the whole brisket finds an incomplete store and buys elsewhere. Import removes the excuse: a complete catalogue is no more work than a thin one, because both are just one file.

The pattern is the same every time. The manual paths cost you hours, or money, or sales, and they cost you again every season when things change. The product import software in Farm To Net costs you one upload and a glance at a preview, the first time and every time after.

Import does not stand alone, either. It is the fastest way to fill the catalogue that powers everything else. The products you upload flow straight into your online store, ready to sell with real inventory and checkout. They feed the packing lists and pull sheets in order management when the orders start coming. They stock the recurring boxes in CSA subscriptions. And they appear across the pages you build in the website builder. Bulk import is the on-ramp; the whole farm-commerce system is what it feeds.

From spreadsheet to live catalogue, step by step

To make it concrete, here is exactly what building your catalogue with product import looks like, start to finish:

• Start with the spreadsheet you already have. Your cut sheet, your price list, the file from your processor — whatever holds your products and prices. You do not build anything new; you use what exists.
• Save it as a CSV. In Excel or Google Sheets this is one menu choice — "Save as CSV" or "Download as CSV." That plain file is what the importer reads.
• Upload the file. Choose your CSV in the importer, and Farm To Net reads every row as a product, matching each one against your catalogue by name.
• Read the preview. Before anything commits, you see exactly what will happen — how many products will be created, how many updated, and every price that will change, from old to new. This is your checkpoint.
• Confirm, and it goes live. When the preview looks right, you commit. Forty cuts become forty live products in seconds. If something looks off, you stop, fix the spreadsheet, and upload again — nothing touched your store until you said so.
• Re-run it whenever the price list changes. New season, new prices? Edit the same spreadsheet, upload again, and the importer matches every product by name and updates the prices in one bulk price update. No duplicates, no retyping, ever.

That is the whole loop, and it is deliberately short. The first pass builds the store. Every pass after keeps it current. And at no point do you type a product you have already typed somewhere else.

A catalogue that keeps up with your farm

The best thing bulk import does is not the first upload, dramatic as that is. It is the fact that your catalogue never falls behind your farm again. When a processor's numbers change, when a season turns, when you finally reprice the whole list, the update is a spreadsheet edit and one upload — not a dreaded afternoon of clicking that you put off for weeks while the wrong prices cost you money. Your store stays as current as your spreadsheet, because your spreadsheet is what feeds it.

You have already done the hard part. You raised the animals, worked out the cuts, set the prices in a file you trust. Product import is simply the shortest possible line between that file and a live, complete, correctly-priced store — matched by name, previewed before it commits, and safe to run again the next time anything changes. Upload the sheet. Check the preview. Open for business.

Frequently asked questions

How do I import my products into Farm To Net?

You save your product spreadsheet as a CSV file and upload it. Farm To Net reads every row as a product, matches each one to your catalogue by name, and shows you a preview of exactly what will change before anything commits. Confirm the preview and your whole catalogue goes live in one upload — no typing products one form at a time.

Can I update all my prices at once?

Yes. A bulk price update works the same way as the first import. You change the prices in your spreadsheet, upload it again, and the importer matches every row to the product it already created by name and updates the prices in one go. You see a preview of every price change — old price to new price — before it commits, so repricing forty products takes seconds instead of an afternoon of clicking.

What happens if I import products that already exist?

Products are matched by name. If a name in your file already exists in your catalogue, the importer updates that product instead of creating a duplicate. If the name is new, it creates a new product. That is why the import is completely safe to re-run whenever your price list changes — the same names match the same products every time.

Will importing overwrite my catalogue by accident?

No. Nothing is written to your live store until you confirm. Before it commits, the import shows a plain-language preview of exactly what will happen — how many products will be created, how many updated, and every price that will change. If anything looks wrong, you stop, fix the spreadsheet, and upload again. Your store is never touched until you say so.

Can I import a spreadsheet from my processor or another platform?

Yes. Any spreadsheet you can save as a CSV works, whether it is your own cut sheet, a price list your processor emailed you, or a product export from another platform. After a little cleanup to match the columns and confirm the prices are your retail prices, the file becomes your live catalogue. Migrating from another store or a spreadsheet is a single upload, not a rebuild from scratch.

What does product import cost?

Bulk product import is included from the Starter plan at $29/month, with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required to start. There are no per-product fees and no extra charge to re-run the import when your prices change — uploading your whole catalogue and repricing it every season are both included.