Import into Zoho CRM — CSV, Excel & PDF

• Overview
• From
• Into

Importing for your users — or for yourself?

Building a product that feeds Zoho CRM? A sync product, agency tooling, a vertical app built around Zoho — this page is your integration guide: your users bring files, clean records land in the CRM (and your backend sees every row first), and nobody leaves your app. Read on.

Just trying to get your own file into Zoho CRM? You have the file and the account; the file is the problem — renamed headers, merged columns, a PDF where a spreadsheet should be. See the wizard handle genuinely messy files in the playground (free, no signup). And a run-it-yourself importer is in the works: your own Zoho authorization, runs on your machine, every row staged for review — and revertible after it lands. Join the waitlist.

Goal: your users bring the file they have — CSV, Excel, even a PDF or a scan — and clean records land in Zoho CRM without leaving your product, and without you writing a mapping/validation UI. The pattern is the same every time: embed → validate → deliver. Mildport handles the first two; your webhook handler owns the Zoho CRM API call.

1. Embed the importer

<mildport-import
  api-base-url="https://imports.your-infra.example"
  license-key="SIGNED_TENANT_KEY"
  catalog-key="zoho-crm"
></mildport-import>

2. Publish a catalog that mirrors Zoho CRM

The schema lives in a target catalog, not in host code. Create it in the catalog editor (/admin/catalogs on your engine, or embed <mildport-catalog-editor>), match Leads (and Contacts, Accounts, Deals if you write those), and publish. The widget loads that published catalog by catalog-key.

Zoho rejects a batch if any Lead misses Last_Name. Mark last name and company required in the catalog so the review step catches that before delivery. Email is the usual duplicate-check field.

Users then upload anything — renamed headers, six languages, XLSX/ODS, even PDF tables — and Mildport’s deterministic matcher plus the review step produce typed, validated rows.

Need the schema computed per user at runtime, or versioned with your app? That’s the schema-as-code path — pass targets from host code instead of catalog-key.

3. Deliver from your webhook

Clean rows arrive on your signed apply webhook; your handler feeds Zoho CRM:

POST https://www.zohoapis.eu/crm/v8/Leads with {"data":[...]} (OAuth; use the EU/US DC your org lives in)

Zoho CRM-specific gotchas

• Zoho rejects a batch if ANY record misses a mandatory field (Last_Name for Leads) — Mildport’s required-field gate catches this before delivery.
• 100 records per API call — chunk the webhook payload.
• duplicate handling: use Zoho’s upsert with duplicate_check_fields (e.g. Email) instead of insert.

Why not Zoho CRM’s own CSV import?

Zoho’s own CSV import is an end-user wizard inside Zoho — you can’t embed it in YOUR product, brand it, validate against your rules, or route the result through your backend.

---

Try the flow first: the playground (no signup), then the Quickstart and target catalogs. Prices are published — hosted and flat-annual self-host — at mildport.com/#pricing.