Documentation
The rules, in full, and where each one came from.
This is the specification our validator implements, published whole rather than summarised. It is the most useful thing we own, and it is more useful to you here than it was in our repository.
Specification
The Shopify product CSV grammar
The complete rule reference our validator implements, generated from the rule table the engine actually runs. Every rule with its severity, the evidence behind it, and the fix.
Specification
The WooCommerce product CSV grammar
The same treatment for WooCommerce, and an honest account of why the writer for it is not built: the structural model is understood, the behaviour is not measured.
Record
How we know what we know
Where every rule came from, what the evidence tags mean, why a measurement may lower a severity and never raise it, and the searches that failed.
Why we publish this
The obvious objection is that a specification is a moat and printing it hands it to a competitor. It is not the moat. What is hard here is not knowing that a handle collision merges two products — it is having twenty-one real supplier catalogues to test against, the four defects those files found that our own tests did not, and an engine that survives them.
What we lose by publishing is nothing. What we gain is the only credential a business with no customers can have: the work itself, in public, checkable.
Every error string quoted anywhere on this site came out of a real store we broke on purpose and recorded. None of it is from documentation — we tried that twice and it was wrong both times.
What is in here
- 20 rules
- The complete Shopify table, each with its severity, its evidence and its fix — generated from the table the engine runs, not transcribed from it.
- 14 failure pages
- Written against recorded evidence. The index is here, and 10 of them cover failures the platform reports no error for.
- One record
- How each rule was established, and what we could not establish.
Or skip the reading and run a file.
Every rule on these pages runs on the free Pre-Flight Report, against your own file, in about a minute.
Check a file free