Tutorial: from messy CSV to live products in five minutes

Before you start

• An active Shopify store you have admin access to.
• A product CSV — a supplier feed, a platform export, a spreadsheet you built yourself, or the sample file linked from the dashboard.
• Five minutes of focused time. No coding required.

Step 1 — Install

1. Open the CSV Fixer listing on the Shopify App Store.
2. Click Install and choose the target store.
3. Approve the two requested scopes: read_products and write_products. Nothing else is requested.
4. You'll land on the dashboard. Your three free uploads are already active.

Step 2 — Upload a CSV

1. Click Upload in the left navigation, or drag a file onto the dropzone.
2. Pick any product CSV up to 50 MB. CSV Fixer uploads it for analysis and stores the job so you can review, import, retry, or delete it later.
3. When the upload finishes, you'll be routed to the analysis view for that job.

Tip: if you're unsure whether a file is "good enough" to upload, upload it anyway. The health report is much more informative than guessing at the CSV in a spreadsheet.

Step 3 — Read the health report

The analysis view shows a health score out of 100 and a list of every issue found. Issues are grouped by category:

• Headers — columns that don't match the expected Shopify schema, or that need renaming.
• Handles — products missing a URL handle, or with conflicting handles across rows.
• Prices — currency symbols, commas, trailing spaces, or non-numeric characters that would block an import.
• Encoding — UTF-8 issues that cause accented characters to show up as boxes.
• Variants — variant rows without a parent, or variant rows whose option values don't line up with the parent.

Step 4 — Review automatic fixes

CSV Fixer applies deterministic cleanup automatically, then shows the exact issue list and before/after preview before anything is imported.

• Auto-fixed — safe, deterministic changes (e.g. renaming product_name → Title, stripping a dollar sign from a price, normalizing handles).
• Needs review — issues that remain visible because they may require source-data judgment before import.

Aim for a strong health score before moving on; you can still import with warnings, but they remain visible during preview.

Step 5 — Preview & import

1. Review the before/after preview. You'll see the source CSV and the cleaned version side by side.
2. If anything looks wrong, download the fixed CSV or correct the source file and upload again. Nothing has been sent to Shopify yet.
3. Click Import to Shopify. CSV Fixer streams the cleaned rows into Shopify through resumable batches and reports progress live.
4. When the import finishes, you'll see per-row status. Any row that Shopify rejected will include Shopify's own error message so you can correct the source data and re-run.

Step 6 — Re-run or clean up

• Every job stays in File history so you can re-download the cleaned CSV or inspect which fixes were applied.
• When you're done with a file, click Delete to remove the CSV and its job record from our servers immediately.
• If you uninstall CSV Fixer, Shopify sends a shop/redact webhook 48 hours later and we delete every record we hold for your store automatically.

Next steps

• Run out of free uploads? Open Billing in the app and purchase the $99 Lifetime plan through Shopify Billing.
• Hit a scenario the app didn't handle well? Email [email protected] with the job id — we reply within one business day.