PLEASE READ CAREFULLY!!!

I have a Virtuemart site with 87000 products. I need help with adding new products and updating existing products. There are a LOT of categories (around 8000) and the previous developer created a 'search' feature for when you add a new products. So instead of scrolling through a list of categories, like the default VM, this search function was added. It's not very practical because it's hard to remember all those category names.

What I need is an EASY way to update and add new products, either with a CSV file or some other method.

Since there are so many products and this is on shared hosting there is a php time-out issue, which can't be fixed unless the site gets moved to a VPS or Dedicated hosting, which isn't going to happen.