Shopify product CSV import errors, and what causes each one

Shopify’s import report tells you what failed. It rarely tells you why, and it is silent about the problems that do not fail — a price that defaulted to zero, a column that was dropped, a product that was ignored. These eight pages cover the errors that actually come up, each with the Shopify documentation behind it and the check that catches it before you upload anything.

The errors

Errors, warnings, and the difference that matters

Shopify treats these inconsistently, so this tool does not. A problem that would make Shopify reject a row is an error here, and ticking export valid rows only leaves those rows out of the file. A problem that imports successfully but produces something you did not intend — a blank price, a product with more variants than your theme can render — is a warning, and never blocks an export.

That distinction is the reason the validation table is worth reading rather than skimming for red. The errors tell you what Shopify will refuse. The warnings tell you what Shopify will accept and you will regret.

Before any of this

Most import failures are decided by the shape of the source export rather than by a single bad cell. If you are migrating from a particular platform, the preset guides describe how each one models variants, images and weights — which is where the errors on this page come from in the first place.

Nexum Gate is not affiliated with Shopify Inc. Every error message quoted here is Shopify’s own wording, cited to its help centre on the page that discusses it.