Make a bulk product upload CSV from Excel — without broken characters or lost leading zeros
2026-10-06
Uploading a CSV beats entering dozens of products one at a time. But a CSV saved straight from Excel often arrives with mangled accented characters, columns shifted by a comma inside an option name, or SKU 00123 turned into 123.
Use the tool
Start from the platform's template
Most platforms provide a bulk upload template. Keep its column order and headers exactly. Removing or renaming a single column gets the upload rejected.
What goes wrong saving from Excel
- Broken characters — Excel may use the system encoding, while the platform expects UTF-8
- Lost leading zeros — Excel treats 00123 as a number and drops the zeros
- Shifted columns — an option like red, blue contains a comma and splits the field
Converting with this tool
Excel to CSV saves with a UTF-8 byte order mark so accented characters survive, and wraps fields containing commas in quotes so columns stay aligned. For leading zeros, format that column as Text in Excel before converting.
Before uploading, open the CSV in a plain text editor and check that the header row and the first data row line up field by field.