How to clean a supplier product CSV before importing to Shopify
By Zijian Xiao A supplier spreadsheet can look perfectly readable and still need work before you import it. Product names sit under unfamiliar headers, a price uses a decimal comma, and an SKU has lost its leading zeros. The difficult part is deciding which changes are safe to automate and which require a decision about the underlying product. Here is a spreadsheet workflow first, followed by a…
Preparation is key when importing a supplier CSV into Shopify. An untidy spreadsheet can cause havoc during the import process. First, make a copy of the original file and decide which rows represent individual products. Identify the relevant columns for title, SKU, price, and barcode. Be aware that supplier terminology may vary and some columns may be irrelevant to your import.
In the CSV, maintain SKU and barcode values as text to preserve leading zeros. Duplicate SKUs should be examined closely, as they could represent either duplicate products or variants. Prices and currency should be checked for consistency and formatting issues. Titles should have unnecessary whitespace removed, and missing values or barcodes should be handled appropriately without generating new barcodes.
After cleaning the data, create a new sheet with the desired output columns and export the CSV file. Inspect the raw text in a text editor to ensure that conversions have not introduced errors. For a real-world example, a four-product CSV with semicolon delimiters was processed using Rowmoss's conversion code. Duplicate SKUs were corrected, and prices were verified to be in the correct currency. The final output was a UTF-8 CSV with corrected titles, SKUs, prices, and barcodes, ready for import into Shopify.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
