Hi Steve/Doug,

The documentation for importing OE orders specifies that if the Contact value is blank in the import file, the results will be that either the customer ShipTo Address record, Customer Master record or Entry Template default value will be used as a fallback for populating the order field. Only in the unlikely event that all of these are blank will the imported order have a blank contact field.

It works this way so that if you want to import a Contact (or other Customer) value different than what is stored in the data, you can do this for some orders, but leave the field blank for other orders so that the standard customer values can be imported. In the same way, not including a field in the import template means that values can be read from stored data records. This allows flexibility in creating import templates and not requiring every field to be included in the file.

Changing this to import a blank value from the import file would be a significant change to the import process, and would nullify a good number of templates used by clients. Perhaps for your client, importing a single character into the Contact like a period or dash would suffice for their purposes, as this non-blank value would be used to override whatever is on the customer or shipto record.