GoDaddy to Shopify: converting a product CSV export

GoDaddy’s export is unusually close to Shopify’s own column names already, which makes this one of the easier migrations on this site — right up until a quantity cell or a repeated option value gets through unnoticed.

Where the file comes from

Shopify’s migrating-from-GoDaddy guide has you go to Commerce → Products in the GoDaddy dashboard, click Import/Export → Export, choose All products, then collect the file GoDaddy emails to the account’s registered address and save it as GoDaddyProductDownload.csv.

Its “Data mapping for GoDaddy” table is the shortest on this site in one sense: for most columns the action is literally “No action needed”, because GoDaddy already writes Option1 Name, Option1 Value, Option2 Name and so on through Option3 Value, plus SEO Title and SEO Desc — the same fields Shopify’s own CSV uses, just with different capitalisation.

Pitfall 1: QTY keeps its unit, and the guide tells you to fix it by hand

Shopify’s table maps QTY → Variant Inventory Qty with the instruction “Remove any non-numerical characters” — meaning real GoDaddy exports hand you cells like 25 units or 40 pcs, not a bare number. The converter’s own number parser already strips that kind of suffix before writing the integer, so 25 units becomes 25 without the manual edit the guide describes. It is still worth opening the raw file once: a cell the parser cannot recover anything numeric from imports as blank inventory rather than a false zero.

Pitfall 2: the same option value, twice, on one product

GoDaddy’s guide does not name a column that groups a product’s variant rows together — unlike Wix’s handleId or WooCommerce’s parent/variation structure, there is no identifier here beyond the repeated product name. The converter falls back to matching rows by Name, which works until two rows for the same product carry the identical option value by mistake — a re-exported file with a colour entered twice, or a copy-pasted row nobody edited.

Shopify has no concept of two variants that are the same colour: it rejects the whole product with “options are not unique”. The bundled sample’s canvas tote bag has exactly this — Natural and two rows of Charcoal, one of them a duplicate SKU that should have been a different colour. The validator names both rows so you can tell which one to fix rather than guessing.

Pitfall 3: Option columns pass straight through, but only if your file matches the table

The “no action needed” columns are a convenience, not a guarantee. They assume your export really does carry Option1 Name/Option1 Value with that exact capitalisation for every option your products use. A store with a single option still gets all three pairs in the header row — Shopify’s own sample files leave Option2 and Option3 blank rather than omit the columns — so check that a product using only Option1 does not have stray data sitting in Option2 or Option3 from an earlier edit.

What the preset maps

Name → Title, Description → Description, Category → Type, SKU → SKU, QTY → Inventory quantity, Price → Price, SEO Title → SEO title, SEO Desc → SEO description, and the three Option<N> Name/Option<N> Value pairs → Option1–3. Every mapped column is named in Shopify’s own published table for this platform — there is nothing left as a best-effort guess here.

Before you upload to Shopify

• Import into a development store or a draft-status batch first. Set the default status to draft in the tool and nothing goes live by accident.
• Shopify caps a product CSV at 15 MB. Bigger catalogues are split into numbered parts, and a product is never split across two files.
• Overwriting existing products by handle is destructive: a blank cell can erase data that is currently there. Export your live products first if you are updating rather than creating.

Full column contract: the Shopify product CSV format, column by column. Nexum Gate is not affiliated with Shopify Inc.