7 costly Shopify import mistakes (and how to undo them)

Why imports go wrong

Most broken imports aren't caused by a big mistake. They're caused by a spreadsheet program quietly “helping”: reformatting an ID, swapping a dot for a comma, trimming a leading zero. Here are the seven we see most often, and what to do about each.

1. IDs turned into scientific notation

Shopify product and variant IDs are long numbers. Open an export in Excel and 7234567890123 becomes 7.23457E+12. Save the file and the real ID is gone, so the import can't find the product.

Bulkvane checks for this and stops the row with a clear message: “ID 7.2E+12 was shortened by your spreadsheet program (scientific notation). Format the ID column as Text and export again.”

2. Decimal commas and currency symbols

A supplier in Germany sends “19,50 €”. Shopify expects 19.50. Depending on the tool, that becomes 1950, an error, or nothing at all.

Bulkvane reads decimal commas, thousands separators and currency symbols, converts them, and tells you it did: “Price “12,50 €” contains a currency symbol and a decimal comma — it will be saved as 12.50.”

3. Handles with spaces or capitals

Handles are the product's URL slug. They can only use lowercase letters, numbers and dashes. “Blue Linen Shirt” isn't a valid handle; “blue-linen-shirt” is. A bad handle can create a duplicate product instead of updating the existing one.

4. Rows with no ID, handle or title

Every row needs something that says which product it belongs to. Variant rows copied from another sheet often lose that link. Keep the Handle column filled on every variant row, even if it repeats.

5. Tags separated the wrong way

Shopify separates tags with commas. Exports from other systems often use semicolons or pipes, which turns “summer;linen” into one strange tag. Bulkvane splits on “;” and “|” too, and removes duplicates.

6. Status values that don't exist

Product status must be Active, Draft or Archived. “Published”, “Live” or “hidden” won't work. Bulkvane accepts different capitalisation and tells you when a value isn't recognised.

7. No way back

The costliest mistake is the one you can't reverse. Shopify's CSV import has no undo, so a wrong file means fixing products one by one or restoring from an old export — if you have one.

1. Export your catalogue before any big change and keep the file.
2. Use a tool that shows every change before applying it.
3. Prefer imports that can be undone. In Bulkvane, each import saves a snapshot first, and one click restores every product it changed for 30 days.