Fix a Broken Shopify Product CSV — Right Here in Your Browser

The three ways Excel breaks a Shopify export

Shopify's product CSV is a plain-text file with columns like Handle, Title, Variant SKU and Variant Barcode. The moment you double-click that file to edit prices or stock, Excel parses every cell and "helpfully" reformats it — and when you save, the reformatted version is what gets written back. Three specific things break, and all three block or corrupt a Shopify import:

• Barcodes become scientific notation. UPC-A is 12 digits, EAN-13 is 13, GTIN-14 is 14 — every one is long enough for Excel to treat as a number and display as 8.85909E+11. Shopify stores whatever is in the Variant Barcode field verbatim, so that E-notation quietly becomes your live barcode and breaks channel syncs to Google, Amazon and Facebook.
• SKUs and codes lose their leading zeros. A Variant SKU of 0071589 or a location code of 00501 loses the front zeros the instant Excel reads it as a number, so 0071589 ships as 71589 and your inventory references stop matching.
• Titles and descriptions turn into mojibake. Café Mug becomes Café Mug, and smart quotes become “, when the file's UTF-8 encoding is misread. Shopify imports the garbled text straight onto your storefront.

Click Analyze my Shopify CSV above and the tool scans your file and reports exactly how many cells are affected in each category — then repairs them together. You choose which columns to touch, so a genuine number column (price, quantity) is left alone while the barcode and SKU columns get fixed.

What is recoverable — the honest version

Two of the three problems are fully repairable; one has a limit worth knowing before you rely on the file.

• Mojibake and leading zeros: fully recoverable. Garbled characters are reversed by re-decoding the bytes, and dropped zeros are re-padded to the width you specify. Nothing is lost.
• Scientific-notation barcodes: recoverable unless Excel already truncated digits. Excel keeps at most 15 significant digits and often writes only ~6 to the CSV, so 885909457123 can be saved as 8.85909E+11 — the format is restored and the length is right, but digits past the saved mantissa were lost on save. GTINs carry a check digit, so a wrongly padded barcode usually fails validation downstream; those specific rows should be re-exported from your product source.

How to re-import into Shopify without breaking it again

1. Repair the file above and download it. Leave Excel-safe export off for a file you are uploading straight to Shopify — the importer stores the = as part of the barcode — and tick it only if you will reopen the file in Excel first. Keep Add UTF-8 BOM ticked either way.
2. In Shopify admin, go to Products → Import and upload the repaired CSV. Preview a few rows before confirming.
3. To edit the file again later, do not double-click it. Open Excel to a blank workbook, use Data → From Text/CSV, and set the Variant Barcode and Variant SKU columns to Text in the preview before loading.
4. Keep an untouched copy of every export, and generate the CSV as the very last step so Excel never gets the chance to reformat it.

Fix one type of damage on its own

This page repairs all three at once, but if only one thing is wrong you can use the focused tool: expand scientific-notation barcodes, restore leading zeros in SKUs and codes, or fix garbled characters in titles. Not sure what encoding your file is in? Run the CSV encoding checker. For the full background with screenshots, read the guide on Shopify CSV special-character problems or why Excel turns barcodes into scientific notation, and browse all guides.

Still getting an error from Shopify itself rather than bad-looking data? Our Shopify CSV import error decoder matches each message — missing headers, a variant that “already exists”, the file-size limit — to the cell that caused it. Selling on more than one channel? The same repairs cover Amazon flat file upload errors.

Frequently asked questions