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 theVariant Barcodefield 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 SKUof0071589or a location code of00501loses the front zeros the instant Excel reads it as a number, so0071589ships as71589and your inventory references stop matching. - Titles and descriptions turn into mojibake.
Café MugbecomesCafé 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
885909457123can be saved as8.85909E+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
- Repair the file above and download it (leave Excel-safe export ticked and the UTF-8 BOM on).
- In Shopify admin, go to Products → Import and upload the repaired CSV. Preview a few rows before confirming.
- 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 BarcodeandVariant SKUcolumns to Text in the preview before loading. - 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.
Scroll up or click below — drop the export, review what it found, download a clean CSV ready to import. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Fix my Shopify CSV nowFrequently asked questions
Why does my Shopify product CSV import fail or upload broken data?
Almost always because the file passed through Excel on the way to Shopify. Excel rewrites CSV data on open and save: 12–14 digit barcodes collapse into scientific notation like 8.85909E+11, leading zeros drop off SKUs and codes, and accented characters in titles turn into mojibake such as café. Shopify then rejects the import or stores the broken values verbatim as your live product data.
Is it safe to upload my Shopify product data to this tool?
Nothing is uploaded. The repair runs entirely in your own browser tab — your product list and prices never leave your device and are never sent to any server. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the tool still works.
Will the repaired CSV import cleanly back into Shopify?
Yes, in the vast majority of cases — the repair restores the Handle, Variant SKU, Variant Barcode and title columns to valid text. Tick Excel-safe export so barcodes don't re-collapse if you reopen the file in Excel, and keep the UTF-8 BOM so accents display correctly. If Excel truncated real digits before you saved, re-export those products from your source and import via Data → From Text/CSV with the barcode column set to Text.