Dataflow Profiles - Not amending customers - creating new one

Question

Hi basically I have 1000s of customers who don't have addresses in magento (1.9.0.1) that were imported previously.

I go into dataflow profiles, export a specific customer (as a test) so I have a CSV layout and then paste into the columns the data for the customers and their addresses to import back in.

What I want is to basically amend these customers with new addresses I have in another CSV.

I exported a customer and pasted in the address into the billing and shipping columns and used data profiler to import it back in.

However the problem I am having is that it is creating a duplicate customer and not amending the current one.

Can anyone suggest why this may be happening?

Thanks

Answer 1

I believe Dataflow only allows creation of new customers. Magmi importer should let you update existing customers. If you don't want to use Magmi, I think the only other option is dumping the customers and re-uploading with the new data, though you'd lose customer history without a lot of backup and re-working of the data.

Answer 2

Bit late on this, but hopefully it'll help someone else.

I had this issue and the dataflow importer does indeed allow you to add the customer address to existing customer records. It appears that as long as the email address is present, it will pick up the existing customer and add their address accordingly.

Here are the column headings I'm using:

website,email,billing_firstname,billing_lastname,billing_company,billing_postcode,billing_city,billing_street1,billing_telephone,billing_country,billing_region,shipping_firstname,shipping_lastname,shipping_company,shipping_postcode,shipping_city,shipping_street1,shipping_telephone,shipping_country,shipping_region,_address_default_billing_,_address_default_shipping_

So as long as website and email fields are present, it's intelligent enough to pick it up and update it.