A WooCommerce export, going into Shopify

How you recognise it

• An ID column, a Type column reading simple or variable or variation, and a SKU.
• Variation rows that reference their parent rather than repeating a group key.
• Attribute columns spelled as Attribute 1 name and Attribute 1 value(s).

What goes wrong

Worst first, and the worst one is nearly always the one that reports nothing.

• The parent-child relationship has no equivalent in the Shopify file. It has to become a repeated handle, and a mechanical rename of the column does not do that.
• A variable parent row carries no price of its own. Copied across as a product row it becomes a product priced at nothing.
• Woo lets one attribute hold several values in one cell. Shopify wants one value per variant row, and the expansion is where variant counts silently change.

What we do about it

• Row roles are classified before anything is mapped, so a parent row and a variation row are never treated as the same kind of thing.
• Rows in and rows out are counted and reported on every run. A transformation that changes the count says so.
• The WooCommerce grammar is published in full, next to the Shopify one, so the two models can be compared rather than assumed to match.

Other shapes

• A Magento export, going into Shopify — A workbook that says it has forty rows and physically contains eight thousand. Most tools read the declaration.
• 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.

All export shapes · Import errors, measured · The Shopify product CSV grammar