Update: Get it at http://bigcommerce-coupon-importer.com
A buddy of mine has an eCommerce storefront through BigCommerce, a hosted eCommerce solution. He was looking to run a Gilt City promotion, so he would have to import ~150 coupon codes into BigCommerce.
My friend spent some time looking around for an import codes feature and I would have assumed that a solution like BigCommerce would support a CSV import for coupon codes as well. However, we Googl’ed around a bit and it turns out BigCommerce does not support CSV imports for coupon codes. We stumbled upon this discussion on the BigCommerce forums discussing this shortcoming at length.
On the forum thread, someone had previously developed an iMacros script to automate importing the codes. Unfortunately, I tried using the iMacros script without any success. It looks like BigCommerce has updated the HTML on the page which is breaking the script. Anyway, looking at the iMacro and the opaque syntax I decided it would be easier to whip together a Chrome extension to automate creating coupon codes so decided to move forward with that.
Chrome extensions naturally lend themselves to automating things like this since it’s pretty straightforward to use the background page to maintain any state and hold variables and then use a content script to manipulate the DOM of the page and submit any forms that you need to.
You can grab the extension here http://setfive.com/misc/BigComm Importer.crx you’ll obviously need to be running Google Chrome for it to work.
Also, fork it at https://github.com/adatta02/bigcommerce-coupon-importer
What it does is add a “Bulk Import” button to the “Coupon Codes” page on your BigCommerce site – http://[yourstore].mybigcommerce.com/admin/index.php?ToDo=viewCoupons
If you click that button, a copy of the “add code” form will be displayed along with a textbox. You’ll just need to fill out the form, enter a list of coupon codes you want to create – one per line, and then click “Start Import”.
Your browser will automatically go through and create all your coupon codes. Thats it!
As always, let me know if you run into any issues or have any comments.