Getting started

Bring your history in from another platform

3 minute read

If you have been selling somewhere else, your history can come with you. The Import page on your dashboard reads the export file you download from your current platform and turns it into real records in Broidry: past orders with their totals, the customers behind them, and product exports as draft listings. Your client book and your sales history are filled in from day one instead of starting empty.

Broidry recognizes the standard self-serve exports from Etsy, Shopify, Square, Squarespace, Wix, Big Cartel, and PayPal. If your history lives in a plain spreadsheet instead — or an export Broidry does not recognize — you can still import it: Broidry shows you the file's own columns and you point at which one holds the name, the item, the price, and the date. Only a name column is required.

The Import page with the drop-a-CSV zone and, below it, the Etsy orders section.

How it works

  1. 1In your current platform, download your order export. Every platform has its own export button in its settings, and the file it gives you is a plain spreadsheet.
  2. 2Open the Import page on your Broidry dashboard — it is not in the sidebar, so use the import link on your Today page or add /import to your dashboard's address — and drop the file in.
  3. 3Broidry detects which platform the file came from and shows you a preview: exactly which orders, customers, or products will be created, and how many rows it skipped.
  4. 4Review the preview and apply it. Nothing is saved until you do. If the preview looks wrong, do not apply it.
Note: Imported past orders are marked as imported and come in with the status Done, so they build your history without landing on your production list. Imported products arrive hidden, so you can review them and add photos before customers see them.

No file? Type them in instead

Plenty of shops keep their customers in a notebook, a phone, or a spreadsheet of their own, with no platform to export from. Open your Customers page and press "Add past customers". Put one person on each line, with their name and their email, and press the button. A phone number works instead of an email, and pasting a column straight out of a spreadsheet works too.

There is one checkbox under the box: "Also email these people when I add new work". Leave it unchecked and your customers are simply in your customer list, with nothing sent to them. Check it and they also join your email list, so Broidry includes them when it emails a roundup of your new pieces. Only check it for people who bought from you in the last couple of years and agreed to hear from you. Two reasons for the time limit: a customer from five years ago is the one most likely to mark you as spam, which hurts whether your next email reaches anybody at all, and Canada's email law only lets you write to a past customer for two years after they bought. Broidry does its half by putting an unsubscribe link and your business address on every email it sends for you.

Note: Customers you add this way are past history, exactly like an imported one. They never land on your production list and they never count toward the monthly order limit on the free plan.

What the import never does

The import only reads a file you downloaded yourself from your own account. Broidry never asks for your login to another platform and never connects to it behind the scenes.