WooCommerce Product CSV Checker

How to use it

1. Paste your CSV, or choose the file. Include the header row — the checker needs it to know what each column is.
2. Read the findings, listed by row and column. Errors will stop or corrupt the import; warnings will import but probably aren’t what you meant; notices are just things worth knowing.
3. Fix and re-paste. The checks re-run as you type.
4. Starting from scratch? Download the blank template instead. It has the right headers and four worked example rows.

Your file is read inside the page and never uploaded. There’s no share link on this tool on purpose — a product CSV holds your whole catalogue, prices and SKUs included, and that doesn’t belong in a URL.

The columns WooCommerce understands

Only Name is genuinely required. WooCommerce documents SKU as required too, but it generates one when the column is missing.

That matters more than it sounds. Shopify rejects a malformed file loudly. WooCommerce tends to accept it and produce something subtly wrong, which is harder to notice and harder to undo.

Anything else is fine as custom meta — prefix it with Meta: so the importer maps it. The checker reports unknown columns as notices rather than errors for exactly that reason.

Published is a number, and this is the mistake everyone makes

If your import ran and left everything as a draft, this is why.

WooCommerce reads Published as a number: 1 published, 0 private, -1 draft, 2 pending review. It does not read TRUE and FALSE.

Those come from Shopify, whose product CSV does use TRUE/FALSE — so any file that has been through a Shopify export, or built from a generic e-commerce template, tends to arrive with them. The import doesn’t fail. It just quietly doesn’t publish anything.

The variation trap

This is the one that costs an afternoon, and it’s the reason this tool exists.

A variable product spans several rows. The parent lists every option; each variation gets its own row naming that parent and its own single value.

The last row is broken. The parent offers S, M and L. There is no XL.

WooCommerce imports it anyway, without a single error. You get a variation that exists in the database, has a price, and cannot be selected by any customer. Nothing on the screen tells you. You find out when someone asks why they can’t buy the XL.

The checker compares every variation against its parent’s list and reports the mismatch with both values. It also catches variations with no parent at all, parents that don’t exist in the file, and variable products with no variations attached.

Commas inside a value

Escape them with a backslash.

• Places, People, Cities is one category.
• Places, People, Cities is three.

This bites hardest in attribute values — a colour called Black, White becomes two separate options without the escape, and then your variations stop matching their parent. The checker understands the escape, so a legitimately escaped comma won’t be reported as a fault.

Worked example

Press “Load an example” and you get a deliberately broken file. Two faults, both common:

A real file with these two faults imports “successfully” and produces a hoodie nobody can see and a size nobody can buy.

Updating products instead of creating duplicates

Re-importing a file usually creates a second copy of everything. That is the default, and it is rarely what you want.

Two things prevent it. Include an ID column holding the existing WordPress post ID, or make sure the SKU matches an existing product — WooCommerce matches on either. Then tick Update existing products on the import screen. Miss that checkbox and matching IDs will not save you.

You cannot assign your own ID to a new product. The column only identifies products that already exist, so leave it empty for anything new. The cleanest workflow is to export what you have, edit that file, and import it back with updating switched on — the export already carries correct IDs.

One caution: a partial column set does not merge. If you import a file containing only SKU and Regular price, that is fine and only prices change. But an empty cell in a column you did include can overwrite real data with nothing. Delete columns you are not changing rather than blanking their values.

Exporting first

Products → All Products → Export. You choose which columns to include, which product types, and which categories, then get a CSV with the same structure this tool checks.

Worth knowing before you open it in a spreadsheet: Excel and Google Sheets both like to reformat things. Long numeric SKUs get turned into scientific notation, leading zeros disappear, and dates get rewritten into whatever locale format the machine uses. Import the CSV as text rather than opening it directly, or check the file here afterwards to see what survived.

Common import errors and what they actually mean

The first two are the expensive ones, because neither reports an error. The import screen says it worked.

Large catalogues

WooCommerce imports in batches, and on shared hosting a big file will hit a PHP timeout partway through. That leaves you with a half-imported catalogue and no clear record of where it stopped.

Split anything over a few thousand rows and import the pieces. Keep variations with their parents in the same file — a variation whose parent has not been imported yet has nothing to attach to, and you will get the unselectable-variation problem for a completely different reason.

This checker warns above 5MB rather than trying to parse it, for the same class of reason: a file that size will lock up the browser tab. Split it and check the pieces.

Do you need a paid importer?

Often not. The importer built into WooCommerce handles most catalogues, and it is free.

The paid options — Product CSV Import Suite, WP All Import — earn their money on things the built-in one genuinely cannot do: scheduled recurring imports, pulling from a remote URL or XML feed, mapping arbitrary column names to WooCommerce fields, and importing customers or orders rather than products.

If you are importing a product CSV once, or occasionally, from a file you control, the built-in importer plus a check beforehand is the whole job. That is the gap this tool fills — not replacing an importer, just telling you what is wrong before you run one.

What this cannot tell you

It checks structure and values. That’s a real class of problem, and it’s the class that produces silent failures — but it isn’t all of them.

It can’t reach your image URLs to confirm they resolve. It doesn’t know which categories, tags or shipping classes already exist on your store. It can’t see custom fields a plugin expects. And it has no idea whether your prices are right.

So a clean result means one category of problem has been eliminated, not that the import will work. The tool never says a file is valid, because it isn’t in a position to know.

Related tools

For comparing two exports to see what changed between them, list compare handles line-by-line differences and text compare shows them inline. If your product data came out of an API rather than a spreadsheet, JSON compare does the same job structurally. The invisible character detector is worth a pass over any CSV that came from a word processor — zero-width characters in an SKU will break matching in ways nothing visible explains. And case converter handles bulk-normalising product names before import.