Commerce Server 2007 Catalog Import Breaks Inventory

I have noticed this annoying problem with the Commerce Server 2007 Catalog Manager tool. I have to admit that I haven’t done a lot of research on this topic, so I don’t know what the root cause is, or what fixes there might be available.

We have a staging area that the business folks use to massage data before getting released to production. To get our dev area in sync with stage we can use the Commerce Server Catalog Manager to export the product catalog from our staging server, which creates an xml file, and then use that to import the more up to date catalog on our dev box.

The problem is that when we do the import to the dev box the inventory catalog gets corrupted. I get arround this annoyance by doing a backup export of the dev inventory catalog first, then importing the stage product catalog, and then importing the inventory catalog back again to fix the corruption.

If anyone knows how to fix this little annoyance, please email me.