Why products with no images stuck in Draft after import?

After pushing the products from Import List into the store, sometimes you can see a problem with images. Your products are published, but the status is Draft, and don’t have variants and images. Often it happens if you run the bulk publish actions for a lot of products in your import list.

By default our plugin splits the import process in steps and import your product in the background mode. First it downloads basic product data such as title and description, then loads product images and variations. Such method allows to save your server/hosting resources. While this background process is running, you can close the import page and do other business tasks.

Normally you can check your products in several hours and notice that all products are imported even if you send a lot of products to publish.

To avoid showing incompletely loaded products on the frontend, in Ali2Woo settings you can set Default product status to Draft. When products are fully imported, you need just publish them.

I wait for a few hours but all products stay without images still. How to fix?

There is a special page in the plugin settings where you can check what is happening with your products.

You can see “Import queue” is zero on the screenshot. The empty queue means no product to import, in other words all products have been processed. if you have products in the import queue that is not processed yet or waiting to be processed, the the queue value will not be zero. if you have too many products in your import queue (for example you might use “Publish All Products to Shop” function in the import list earlier), the queue value can be really high.

Normally the queue value is decreased gradually. Its decreasing speed depends on your server/hosting characteristics. However, in some cases on your server can be internal errors or different things that interrupts the schedule tasks. If such problems occur, your queue value will stay unchanged for a long time, for example for a 20 minutes. You can even notice that yourself, just refresh that setting page and check whether the queue value decreased or not in that time interval.

If you find your queue value is not changed, then you have to click “start” button near the import queue value. It will make the plugin to reprocess the queue again. After that, please wait for 20 minutes and then refresh the page. The import queue value should start to decrease in this case. It means your problem resolved and soon all products will be fully imported.

It doesn’t help what to do next?

You can try to disable the background mode.  To do that just untick the Import in the background checkbox in Ali2Woo settings. However, this can cause problems with importing products having a lot of variations and images. If you disable the background import, the plugin will try to impor whole product at once and take a lot of server resources. That’s why we don’t recommend doing that. 

If it doesn’t solve the problem, contact the support center. Our technical specialists help you to resolve it.