Etsy CSV Special Characters: Mojibake, Missing Zeros and One-Column Downloads

Last updated: August 2026 · By the CSVUndo team · 8 min read · Applies to Etsy listing and order CSV downloads · Not affiliated with or endorsed by Etsy

Etsy’s own instructions for the listings download say the CSV “can be imported into most spreadsheet applications, including Excel, Numbers, and Google Spreadsheets” — the official path points sellers straight at the program where the damage happens.

Which CSV files does Etsy actually give you — and can you upload one back?

The listings export lives at Shop Manager → Settings → Options → Download Data → Download CSV. The file arrives as EtsyListingsDownload.csv, carries Title, Description, Price, Currency code, Quantity, Tags, Materials, Image URLs and SKU numbers (if you added them) — and covers active listings only, which is why drafts and expired listings never appear in it. Order data sits on the same Download Data tab: you pick a CSV type — order items, orders, Etsy Payments sales, or Etsy Payments deposits — plus a month and year, then download. Monthly statements are generated separately under Shop Manager’s Finances section.

What Etsy does not have is an importer. Its help center is explicit that Etsy doesn’t have a way to bulk upload new listings; the supported bulk paths are the bulk-edit tool for existing listings (select them on the Listings page, then use the editing options) and copying an existing listing as the starting point for a new one. Be careful researching this: several recent articles describe a “Upload Listings via CSV” feature in Shop Manager, some quoting a 1,500-listing capacity. As of this writing no such feature exists and no Etsy help page documents one. Every genuine bulk-listing workflow — Shop Uploader, Vela-style managers and the rest — works by connecting to Etsy’s Open API and creating listings row by row from your spreadsheet; the CSV itself is never uploaded to Etsy.

That one-way design is why this guide is framed as export → repair → re-use. Nothing at Etsy will ever bounce your file with an error report; instead, whatever Excel did to it flows quietly onward — into a bulk-edit session, an API push, your bookkeeping, or a migration to another platform.

Why do Etsy titles and tags turn into é and ’?

Handmade-goods listings are dense with characters beyond plain ASCII — café, fiancé, curly quotes, dashes, the odd trademark symbol — and every one of them is stored as a sequence of two or more bytes of UTF-8. Double-click the CSV and Excel typically decodes it with your machine’s legacy codepage (Windows-1252 on most PCs) instead, reading those multi-byte sequences one byte at a time. Each é becomes é, each curly apostrophe becomes ’, and a title like Personalised café sign comes out as line noise. Threads on Etsy’s own community forum describe CSV downloads arriving as “jumbled text” — the classic look of correct bytes read with the wrong decoder.

The crucial distinction is display damage versus file damage. At the moment the garbage first appears on screen, the file on disk is still perfect — close without saving and nothing is lost. Click save, and the mojibake is written into the bytes; from then on every program that opens the file sees é, because é is genuinely what it contains. Rather than trusting any claim about what encoding Etsy ships, check the file you actually have: the encoding checker reads the raw bytes and reports what they really are. The full pattern catalogue is in the é-instead-of-é guide.

How do I fix the special characters?

If you have not saved over the download, don’t repair anything — re-download it. The export is free and the fresh copy’s bytes are intact. If the mojibake is already baked in (the file was saved, or the damaged copy is the only one with your edits), repair the bytes directly:

1. Drop the CSV onto the broken characters fixer, or paste the affected rows in. The tool reads the file as raw bytes and detects its encoding first — it never assumes UTF-8.
2. Preview the repair. The common mojibake patterns are reversed — é back to é, ’ back to ’ — while ordinary text passes through untouched.
3. Download the result as clean UTF-8, and keep that copy as your working master.

One honest limit: repair reverses damage that is still in the file. If a round-trip replaced characters with plain ?, the original bytes are gone and no tool can reconstruct them — re-download, or restore from a backup. The wider encoding story is in changing a CSV’s encoding to UTF-8.

Why did SKUs and ZIP codes lose their leading zeros?

The orders CSVs are where this bites, because they carry buyer and shipping details — including columns like the buyer’s ZIP code — alongside SKU, quantity and price. Excel guesses the type of every cell on open, a cell made of digits becomes a number, and to a number parser 07043 and 7043 are the same quantity. The zero is gone before the sheet finishes loading, and one save writes the shortened values into the file — a mail-merge or shipping-label run later, packages addressed to New Jersey start failing validation.

ZIP codes have a standard width, so the fix is mechanical: the leading-zeros fixer lets you tick the ZIP column and pad every digit-run back to five. SKUs are different, and it matters. Etsy’s SKUs are free-form — its own SKU guidance says they can be numbers, letters or both, recommends keeping them to 4–8 characters, and even warns sellers off commas and slashes because they may confuse “certain computer programs like Excel”. Free-form means there is no standard SKU width, so the tool will never suggest one, and never guesses a width from the longest value in the column — padding 0123 and 045678 to one length would rewrite real inventory codes. If your own scheme is fixed-length, set that width yourself; if your SKUs vary, the only safe source for the missing zeros is your inventory records. The same caution applies everywhere: a value is never treated as Excel damage on shape alone, because 2E5 can be a genuine part number. Background reading: why CSV leading zeros disappear.

Why does the whole download land in one Excel column?

This one is Excel’s doing, not the file’s. Excel splits a CSV on the list separator from your operating system’s regional settings, and in much of Europe that separator is a semicolon — so a comma-separated download opens as one long column per row, commas and all. The data is fine; the split never happened. Two clean fixes: import instead of double-clicking — Data → From Text/CSV lets you declare the comma explicitly — or convert the file itself with the delimiter converter, which auto-detects the input separator, respects quoted fields (titles with commas inside them survive), and re-saves in the form your Excel expects. The symptom has its own guides: a CSV that opens in one column and why Excel saves CSV with semicolons.

How do repaired rows get back into Etsy?

Since nothing can be uploaded, repaired data returns by one of three routes, and each has rules worth knowing before you start.

Pasting into the listing editor or bulk-edit tool. Etsy validates titles at save time, and sellers hitting a banned character see the error “You cannot include any of the following characters: $ ^ ` |”. The characters $, ^ and ` are consistently reported as disallowed; the on-screen error also lists |, and documentation for one Etsy syncing tool adds the degree symbol. That matters here because stray symbols are exactly what half-repaired mojibake leaves behind — a leftover ` in a title blocks the save. Titles are also capped at 140 characters, and tools that sync listings to Etsy document further rules, such as %, : and & at most once each and titles starting with a letter or number. Tags get up to 13 per listing, each up to 20 characters with spaces counted.

Pushing through a third-party listing tool. API-based tools treat your spreadsheet as the source of truth, so mojibake in the file becomes mojibake in your shop — or a rejection at push time, like the API’s verbatim “Title cannot be more than 140 Characters”. Before a big push, run the file through the CSV cleaner: it trims stray whitespace, drops blank rows and removes duplicate rows — the small defects that otherwise surface as one cryptic per-row error at a time.

Migrating to another platform. Shopify’s official Etsy migration consumes EtsyListingsDownload.csv directly: you restructure it to Shopify’s product template with one row per variant combination — a listing with 3 sizes and 3 colours needs 9 rows — then import at Products → Import. Repair the encoding before restructuring, or the mojibake multiplies across every variant row. The Shopify CSV fixer and the Shopify import-errors guide cover the receiving end.

How do I stop Excel breaking the next download?

Keep every download untouched and work on a copy — with Etsy the original is always one free re-export away, which is the cheapest backup you will ever have. When you must open a CSV in Excel, never double-click it: open a blank workbook, use Data → From Text/CSV, set the file origin to UTF-8, and type the SKU and ZIP columns as Text before loading. On Microsoft 365 (Version 2309 or later) there is also a permanent switch — File → Options → Data → Automatic Data Conversion — where you can stop Excel removing leading zeros at all. Google Sheets, which Etsy itself lists among the apps that open the CSV, stays UTF-8 end to end and is the lower-risk choice for quick edits. And when you save, choose CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited), which heads off the encoding and the delimiter problem in one move.

Frequently asked questions