A:
When importing your products back into your store, Shopify converts the data from a CSV file. Once you have made changes to your exported CSV file, you then re-import it into your products page (for example), and the changes should be reflected in your store.
Super easy, right?
For the most part, this is a fairly simple process. But thing can go wrong with your Shopify CSV file, causing unwanted changes or even removing important data from your store. The most common problems we see:
- If any of the content in your columns is missing, or in the wrong order, it will result in a “missing headers” error.
- Stores with certain UTF characters inserted into their products find exporting the CSV files results in incorrect or missing characters being inserted into products.
- CSV files edited on Microsoft Excel or Numbers can cause your products to be removed from their relevant image links on the CSV and lost product images.
Unfortunately, this was the case for one of our customers, Andrew Saunders:
“Do yourself a favour and download this plugin. Even though I have not used it – I wish I had downloaded it on my other store when 60% of my product images were deleted after importing a CSV file and costing me weeks of work locating and uploading the images again. Don’t take the risk.”
To ensure that import does not result in a data disaster in your store, we recommend that you backup your store data with Rewind BEFORE importing a CSV file.
Rewind runs automatic backups of your entire store on a daily basis, but you can also run a backup yourself right before importing your CSV file, to make sure that your site stays undamaged. If something were to go wrong with your site after importing your CSV file, you can simply go into your Rewind vault, and rewind your store to the moment it was in before you made the CSV import.