Skip a column in CSV import (multisite data)

Question

I need to import products from a CSV which contains multiple prices for different stores. This is an example of my CSV structure:

store,websites,sku,name,price,wholesale_price,cost,...
admin,"base,usa",testproduct1,"Test Product 1",100,50,30,...
usa,,testproduct1,,120,70,50,...
admin,"base,usa",testproduct2,"Test Product 2",50,30,20,...
usa,,testproduct2,,60,40,30,...

This imports the products correctly, along with the different prices for each product, but it also sets each attribute in my second store (USA) to an empty string rather than leaving it as "use default". I could resolve this by including all of the product data on the second line, where I include the pricing for the USA store, but this could cause problems if an attribute like the product name needs to be changed - the change would need to be made for each store view which could get very annoying!

I'm wondering if there's any way I can tell Magento to skip importing a certain column - so for the lines where I'm just bringing in the pricing info for the USA store, all other attributes are left as "use default".

I'm on Magento CE 1.7.0.2.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I can only answer this for Mage_ImportExport which you should be using anyways because it's much faster than Dataflow:

If you leave empty the sku column, it will use the last product again, but for a different store, which is defined in the _store column. If you leave empty any column, it uses the default value.

You can find more details about the import format at http://www.integer-net.com/2012/04/04/importing-products-with-the-import-export-interface/.