DEV3 AI Catalog Importer for WooCommerce

WooCommerce plugin that turns supplier CSV and Excel price lists, PDF catalogs and product pages into clean products and variations. Every row is reviewed before it is written, every import can be dry-run first, and every import can be rolled back afterwards. Free download: sign in and click Download ZIP. Add your own Google AI Studio (Gemini) API key to switch on the AI features; the documentation says which features work without one.

How it works

We built DEV3 AI Catalog Importer as a WooCommerce plugin in PHP with a React admin. A four-step wizard (Source → Map → Review → Import) keeps every source in staging tables until the shop owner presses Import.

Key design decisions

• Parse without AI first. CSV and TSV with delimiter and encoding detection (UTF-8, UTF-16, Windows-1252), BOM handling and multi-line cells; Excel .xlsx through the plugin's own ZipArchive and XML reader, which refuses DOCTYPE entities; supplier pages through schema.org Product and ProductGroup JSON-LD. A heuristic mapper recognises common supplier headers in six languages, so spreadsheets and structured pages import fully with AI switched off.
• AI as reviewable drafts. Through the Google Gemini API, the plugin suggests column mappings with a confidence score and a reason, reads PDF catalogs sent inline as documents, reads free-form supplier pages, matches supplier categories such as Herren > Polos to the store's existing tree, and polishes titles and short descriptions. Each result is a draft that is applied per column, per category or per row only when accepted.
• Variations from flat rows. Rows sharing a parent SKU become one variable product, and only the attributes whose values differ across the rows become variation attributes. A simple product that gains variations in a later file is converted to a variable product.
• Validation before writes. Missing names, invalid prices, a sale price not below the regular price, duplicate SKUs inside the file and SKUs already in the store (update or skip) are flagged per row in a review grid with filters, search and an edit drawer.
• Dry run and rollback ledger. A dry run runs the same pipeline without writes and records outcomes such as price 5 → 7.25; stock 2 → 40. A real import records every object it creates or changes in a ledger, with a before-snapshot for updates, so rollback can delete what it created and restore what it changed.
• Guarded fetching. Feed URLs, supplier pages and product images go through an SSRF guard: http/https only, ports 80/443, every resolved address public, redirects re-checked at each hop, and connections pinned to the checked IP.

Architecture

Sessions, rows, the ledger and mapping profiles live in four custom tables. Imports and rollbacks run as chunked background jobs (Action Scheduler when available) with progress, cancel and retry. Saved profiles recognise a supplier's file by a signature of its normalised headers, and a profile with a feed URL can re-import on a daily or weekly schedule. A WP-CLI command covers import, dry run and rollback. The API client, encrypted key storage, budget cap, cache and usage logs come from a shared core used across DEV3's plugins.

What's in the download

• The installable plugin zip: upload it through Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
• Full HTML documentation (installation, settings, hooks, FAQ).

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0 or newer and PHP 7.4 or newer
• WooCommerce 8.0 or newer, active (HPOS and block checkout compatible; the importer only writes products, variations, terms and media)
• Optional: a Google Gemini API key. Without one, CSV, Excel, feed URLs and supplier pages with structured product data import fully; PDF catalogs and free-form pages need it

Learn more

• How we built it: the AI Catalog Importer case study
• Engineering write-up on the DEV3 blog
• Also free in the DEV3 AI WooCommerce Plugins Bundle with every other WooCommerce plugin.