A Magento export, going into Shopify
A workbook that says it has forty rows and physically contains eight thousand. Most tools read the declaration.
How you recognise it
- An
.xlsxfrom an admin export rather than a CSV. - A declared sheet dimension that is small, and a file size that is not.
- Attribute-set and store-view columns with no counterpart in a Shopify file.
What goes wrong
Worst first, and the worst one is nearly always the one that reports nothing.
- The declared dimension and the physical content disagree. One export in the corpus declares a range of forty-one rows and carries 8,321 row elements, 8,282 of them empty formatting rows.
- A reader that trusts the declaration reports a tidy row count; a reader that trusts the content reports thousands of blank products. Both are confidently wrong.
- Empty formatting rows survive a copy-paste into a new sheet, so the problem travels.
What we do about it
- The workbook is streamed and rows are counted from content, not from the declared dimension, then the two are compared and the difference is reported.
- Trailing blank rows are named as trailing blank rows rather than counted as products.
- The count you are shown is the count the export will contain, and it is shown before any paid work starts.
Where this came from
Each of these is a real file in our test corpus, run through the engine on every change. We publish the shape and what it proved, never a cell — these are catalogues with real buying prices in them.
- magento_product_export.xlsx
- 39 rows · 20 columns. Declares a range of forty-one rows and physically carries 8,321 row elements, 8,282 of them empty.
What we did not measure. One Magento export, one version. The padding behaviour is a property of how the workbook was written, not a Magento specification, so treat it as a shape we have seen rather than a rule about the platform.
Other shapes
- A Wix catalog export, going into Shopify — Row types encoded in a column, and descriptions with line breaks inside them. A line-based parser splits one product into several.
- A B2B linesheet, going into Shopify — Six hundred columns, most of them empty, and a header row written for a human buyer rather than for an importer.
All export shapes · Import errors, measured · The Shopify product CSV grammar
Run the file you have.
Whatever shape it arrived in, the Pre-Flight Report names every blocker in it before you upload anywhere. Free, no account.
Check a file free