WooCommerce Product Import: What Your Supplier File Is Missing

WooCommerce's built-in product importer is more flexible than Shopify's, but it still expects specific column names and data formats that most supplier spreadsheets don't provide out of the box.

WooCommerce's expected CSV columns — The core columns WooCommerce expects are: Type, SKU, Name, Published, Description, Short description, Regular price, Sale price, Categories, Tags, Images, In stock?, and Stock. The Type column is especially important — WooCommerce needs to know whether each product is simple, variable, grouped, or external.

The Images column — WooCommerce accepts multiple image URLs in a single cell, separated by commas. The first URL becomes the featured image and subsequent URLs become gallery images. Supplier files typically have either a single image URL or no image information at all.

How to convert a supplier file for WooCommerce — Map the supplier's columns to WooCommerce's expected columns, fill in the missing required fields (Type defaults to 'simple' for most products), and validate the result before importing. Running a health check on the supplier file first prevents most errors that only reveal themselves after a failed import attempt.