I have searched near and far and am surprised there do not seem to be any other posts about this kind of issue. Here goes:

My client (website owner, retail merchandise), has 1000's of products they are trying to manage in the Zencart site each day and therefore they use EZ Populate a lot (as best they can).

Lately they have been having a big problem with products that have a sku number/model number starting with zero (0). I have looked at the file they are trying to upload, and I see the numbers there just fine. But it seems whenever they use EZ Populate to upload to the server, all the zeros get stripped out.....

So product 01234 is changed to 1234 instead.

This is especially problematic when they already did have that product in the database (from our original integration) as 01234.....and when EZ Pop uploads the 1234 version it is duplicating that product - so now 100's of products are in the catalog TWICE - once with the zero at beginning, and once without.

So they have 2 important questions:

1) Can we avoid the zeros being stripped? Is this a known issue or is it something they have to live with? Is this something related to the database structure?

2) Is there a way to do a massive delete of those 100's of duplicate products? Besides just using phpmyadmin..

Any advice appreciated. Thanks.