5 Signs Your Supplier Spreadsheet Needs Cleaning Before Import

Importing a supplier spreadsheet directly into Shopify or WooCommerce without checking it first is one of the most common and costly mistakes in ecommerce catalog management. Here are the five signs your file needs cleaning before you touch the import button.

1. Duplicate SKUs — If the same SKU code appears more than once in your file, your store will either throw an import error or silently overwrite one product with another. Suppliers frequently send files where the same product appears in multiple rows — sometimes with different prices or stock levels — because their internal systems export one row per variant rather than one row per product.

2. Prices that don't make sense — A $0.01 price where everything else is $20–$200 is almost always a data entry error. So is a $1,500 item in a catalog of $15 products. Before importing, check whether any prices are wildly out of range compared to the rest of the catalog. One wrong price published to your store can mean selling a $200 product for $2 before you notice.

3. Missing image URLs — Shopify and WooCommerce both expect image URLs that actually resolve to an image file. Supplier files frequently have empty image columns, placeholder text like 'see attached,' or local file paths that only work on the supplier's own computer. Any product imported without a working image URL will appear in your store with no photo.

4. Inconsistent column names — One supplier calls it 'Product Name.' Another calls it 'Title.' A third uses 'Item Description.' If you're managing multiple suppliers, each file arrives with different column naming conventions. Manually remapping columns every week is where most of the time gets lost.

5. Missing inventory counts — An empty stock column doesn't mean zero stock — it might mean the supplier forgot to fill it in. Importing a product with no inventory value can cause it to show as out of stock immediately, or behave unpredictably depending on your store's inventory settings.

The fastest way to catch all five of these before they reach your store is to run the file through a catalog health check before generating any import CSV. ClearCatalogue does this automatically — flagging every issue with the row number so you can review and approve before anything gets exported.