u/Careless-Ad2000

Got a new supplier on board last week. They sent me a product CSV: 800 rows. Shopify rejected it immediately.

Errors were all over the place. Wrong date formats. Missing required fields. Some encoding thing I still don't fully understand (turned out to be UTF-8 vs UTF-16). A few SKUs had trailing spaces that messed up matching.

I fixed it manually in Excel, importing it row by row, cross-referencing errors until it finally went through.

3 hours gone for 800 products.

so, my question is do you guys face this issue?

do you guys have a workflow for this? I'm getting a new supplier shipment every 2 weeks and I cannot keep doing this.

I want to share this because I wish someone had warned me.

We get weekly product CSVs from our main supplier. I open them in Excel, make small edits and update a price here, fix a description there then save, and upload to our store.

Routine. Been doing it for months.

Turns out Excel had been silently converting our SKU codes the whole time. Our supplier uses codes like "00142-B" and "0031-A". Excel saw the leading zeros and decided they were numbers. Stripped the zeros. Saved them back to the CSV without asking.

So "00142-B" became "142-B" in the system. Completely different SKU. Products were being created as duplicates instead of updating existing ones. Inventory counts were off. We had ghost products nobody could find.

We only noticed because a customer ordered something that showed "in stock" but was actually at zero. The real inventory was sitting under the original SKU the whole time.

3 months of bad data. Not from a bug. Not from a hack. From double-clicking a CSV in Windows Explorer.

The fix was annoying: you have to use Data → Get External Data → From Text and manually set every ID column to "Text" format. Every. Single. Time. Excel won't remember it. Won't warn you. Just silently reformats your data.

Does anyone else have a workflow that actually prevents this? I can't be the only one this has happened to.

I run a small SaaS and had a brutal problem: 40% of users who started the import step never finished it.

Session recordings told the story. They'd hit an error message like "Invalid format on row 47" and just... close the tab. Not try to fix it. Just leave.

The errors weren't even hard to fix. Wrong date format. Extra column. Encoding issue. But users saw a wall of red and bailed.

I spent a weekend building a tiny browser-based tool that reads the CSV, spots the issues, and fixes them automatically and no upload to a server, just runs in the browser.

Import completion went from ~60% to ~91% after we started pointing stuck users to it.

The tool is now live as Importly (getimportly dot com) if anyone wants to try it... it's free for small files. But honestly the bigger lesson for me was: the step before your onboarding is as important as the onboarding itself.

Happy to share more about the session recording analysis if anyone's curious.

Founder here.

Got a new supplier on board last week. They sent me a product CSV: 800 rows. Shopify rejected it immediately.

Errors were all over the place. Wrong date formats. Missing required fields. Some encoding thing I still don't fully understand (turned out to be UTF-8 vs UTF-16). A few SKUs had trailing spaces that messed up matching.

I fixed it manually in Excel, importing it row by row, cross-referencing errors until it finally went through.

3 hours gone for 800 products.

so, my question is do you guys face this issue?

do you guys have a workflow for this? I'm getting a new supplier shipment every 2 weeks and I cannot keep doing this.