Why are my accents broken after import?

Encoding. French Excel often saves in Windows-1252 instead of UTF-8. Open the file in a text editor (VS Code, Notepad++), check the encoding, and re-save explicitly as UTF-8 without BOM before importing.

How many products can I import in one pass?

Shopify caps at 15,000 rows per CSV file (50 MB). PrestaShop has no hard limit but PHP timeout usually breaks past 5,000 rows on shared hosting. For larger imports, batch into several files or use the API.

How do I handle variants in a Shopify CSV?

Shopify uses one row per variant with the parent product handle repeated. The first row holds global fields (title, body_html, vendor), following rows only carry option values and variant fields (SKU, price, inventory).

Does Seegea replace CSV import?

No, it complements it. Seegea provides inline tabular editing day-to-day (no CSV roundtrip to change 50 listings), but initial CSV import is still useful to load a large supplier catalog. From there, everything runs inside the Seegea grid, no re-export needed.

CSV product import: reliable method for Shopify & PrestaShop

A successful product CSV import is 3 hours of careful prep that save 3 days of cleanup. Inversely, a sloppy CSV produces duplicates, orphan variants, images pointing nowhere, and a Shopify or PrestaShop catalog to fix row by row.

This guide covers the method we use at Seegea to import catalogs between 500 and 50,000 SKUs without drama. Written for a product manager or e-commerce lead, not a developer.

CSV stack compatible with Seegea

The 5 golden rules of a CSV that passes on the first try

UTF-8 without BOM, always

French Excel defaults to Windows-1252. Explicitly re-save as UTF-8 before importing. Otherwise accents turn into exotic characters and listings become unreadable.

One separator, consistently

Comma for Shopify, semicolon or comma for PrestaShop. Stay consistent across the file: one row with the wrong separator breaks all columns below.

No free text in price columns

A space, a comma or a « € » sign in price and 500 variants get rejected. Clean before importing: price must contain only digits with a dot as decimal.

The required columns for Shopify

Handle — unique URL identifier, binds variants together
Title — commercial name, 70 useful characters max
Body (HTML) — product description in HTML (allowed tags)
Vendor — brand or supplier
Product Category — Shopify taxonomy
Variant SKU, Variant Price, Variant Inventory Qty
Image Src — absolute public URL, HTTPS required
SEO Title / SEO Description

The required columns for PrestaShop

ID — empty on create, filled on update
Name*, Description, Short description
Default category (ID or name), Categories (x,y,z)
Price pre-tax, Tax rule ID
Reference (SKU), EAN
Image URL — can carry several URLs comma-separated internally
Meta title, Meta description, Friendly URL

Watch for duplicates: if you re-import a CSV with existing Handle or Reference without enabling update mode, Shopify and PrestaShop will create duplicates. Always test 5 rows before launching 5,000.

CSV import vs Seegea inline editing: when to use what?

Use case	Native CSV	Seegea
Initial load of a large catalog (10,000 SKUs)	Native CSV import	Seegea CSV import with parsing + validation
Change 50 prices this week	CSV roundtrip via Matrixify/Ablestar	Inline tabular editing, zero export
Mapping a supplier file	Python or Power Query script	Visual Seegea mapping + rules
Undo an import that broke 800 listings	Impossible, restore from backup	Per-product rollback in 1 click
Validation before Shopify push	Errors after import	Dry-run with detailed report

Seegea's 3 differentiators on CSV import

1. AI product description in 1 click

Your supplier CSV has 500 products with 2-line descriptions. Instead of rewriting them manually, Seegea generates a full description, meta title and meta description in bulk from existing attributes. 500 enriched listings in 20 minutes instead of 10 days.

2. Automatic image optimization

Supplier image URLs often return 3 MB JPGs. Seegea downloads, compresses, converts to WebP and resizes to 1000×1000 (Google Shopping format) on the fly during import.

3. Full rollback

Every import creates a version per product. If the import overwrote 200 existing descriptions by mistake, Ctrl+Z restores everything and re-pushes to Shopify or PrestaShop.

Try a Seegea CSV import live

Send us your file, we show you the result before push

Try a Seegea CSV import live

Matrixify, Ablestar, Store Importer: where does Seegea fit?

Matrixify and Ablestar are both excellent CSV-centric tools on the Shopify App Store. Their promise: a much more powerful Excel than the native Store Importer, with advanced transformation rules. If your team lives in Excel, both are solid picks.

Seegea takes a different stance: we replace the CSV roundtrip with inline tabular editing. CSV import is still available for an initial load, but day-to-day you edit directly in the grid, no export-edit-reimport. Teams editing 40 listings/day via CSV handle 400 per day in the grid.

Built in France between Annecy and Chantilly, Seegea is reachable by email and Google Meet — we walk with you on your first big import.

Created in France (Annecy – Chantilly) · Email & Google Meet support

FAQ

Shopify expects a comma with UTF-8 encoding. PrestaShop accepts semicolon (French default) or comma, as long as you declare it in the import screen. The classic mistake: export from French Excel (semicolon) then import into Shopify (comma) without converting — every row is read as a single column.

CSV product import: a reliable method for Shopify and PrestaShop