The six causes, in order of frequency
Work through these from cheapest to most expensive to fix:
Common Scenarios:
- Encoding: the file is ANSI/GBK/Shift-JIS instead of UTF-8 - Shopify cannot parse it.
- File size: above Shopify's limits (15 MB for product CSV uploads).
- Row count: very large files time out before import completes.
- CSV syntax: unescaped quotes or stray commas break the parser at the start.
- Headers: unrecognized header row can fail validation early.
- Upload interruption: the browser or network dropped the request.
Diagnose before you re-upload
ShopTools checks encoding, size, CSV syntax and headers in one pass and tells you which of the six causes your file hits - instead of guessing.
Features:
- Encoding detection: Reports ANSI/GBK/Shift-JIS and offers UTF-8 re-export
- Syntax scan: Finds unescaped quotes and broken rows
- Header validation: Compares against the Shopify product CSV template