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Fixing garbled characters and Excel encoding before a Shopify CSV import

If your product titles show up in Shopify as CafÃ© instead of Café, or the import fails with an "Illegal quoting" error, the problem is almost always how the file was saved. This guide covers the two settings that matter: the encoding (UTF-8) and the delimiter (commas).

What Shopify requires

UTF-8 encoding. Shopify says to save your product CSV in UTF-8 format. Its troubleshooting page says UTF-8 is needed to prevent unexpected characters from appearing in your content.
Commas between columns. Shopify says each column must be separated by a comma. It adds that if you use Excel, you should check Excel's export settings so the file uses commas between values.
Headers on the first line, exactly as in the template.
Straight quotes. Shopify says curly quotes (“ ”) can cause an "Illegal quoting" error, and the quotes in your file need to be UTF-8 encoded.

The easiest route: Google Sheets

Shopify notes that Google Sheets saves files as UTF-8 by default, and it recommends Sheets for viewing product CSVs.

Import your CSV into a new Google Sheet.
Make your edits. Don't sort the rows, because Shopify warns that sorting can separate products from their image links.
Choose File › Download › Comma-separated values (.csv).

If you use Excel

Other spreadsheet programs may need an extra step to save as UTF-8. When you save, pick a CSV option that specifically says UTF-8, and check that your export settings use commas. In some regional settings, the CSV export separates columns with semicolons, and Shopify needs commas. After saving, open the file in a plain text editor. The first line should look like Title,URL handle,Description,... with commas, not semicolons.

Already imported garbled text?

Shopify gives three options:

Fix by hand. Edit each affected product. This works best when only a few are affected.
Import an older version of the file that was saved with the right encoding.
Re-save as UTF-8 and import again.

If you import again with Overwrite products with matching handles turned on, remember that blank cells in included columns overwrite existing values with blanks.

What our checker does about encoding

The free checker converts files saved as Windows-1252 or UTF-16 to UTF-8 and removes the byte-order mark. It also changes semicolon, tab or pipe delimiters to commas, removes blank rows, and strips invisible characters, non-breaking spaces, and leading and trailing spaces from cells (descriptions only lose control characters). Every change goes in the change log.

Its limits are worth knowing:

If a file isn't UTF-8, the checker assumes it's Windows-1252. Files saved in another encoding, such as Mac Roman, could come out with the wrong accents. Check the result.
Text that is already garbled, like Ã© or â€™, is reported but not repaired. The original characters can't be reliably recovered, so you need a clean copy of the source file or a manual fix.
If a row has more or fewer cells than the header (often because of an unquoted comma inside a value), the row is reported and left completely untouched, because its values may be in the wrong columns.

Check your file for free

Run your CSV through the free Shopify Product CSV Checker. Your file is processed in your browser and never uploaded. It fixes only the problems that have one clear answer, reports the rest without changing them, and gives you a change log listing every edit. A fixed file can still fail in Shopify, and Shopify can skip some products even when it says "Products imported". We cannot guarantee Shopify will import every product, so review the change log and check your product count after importing.

Open the free checker

Want us to fix it?

$12 per file. Pay with Stripe, then email your CSV to hello@agentstackmedia.com. We reply with the corrected file and a change log. One free re-fix within 5 days: reply to your delivery email with the Shopify import error. If the re-fixed file still won't import because of our tool, we refund the $12. We can't promise Shopify imports every product. Delivered by email, not instant. We only make changes that have one clear answer, we list anything left for you to fix by hand, and we cannot guarantee Shopify will import every product. Card details go to Stripe and we never see them; we keep your file confidential and use it only to fix it and reply to you.

Sources: Shopify Help Center, Using CSV files to import and export products and Importing products with a CSV file (both read Oct 25, 2026). What our checker does is described from its own documentation. Not affiliated with Shopify. Shopify can change its rules, so check the help pages if something here doesn't match what you see.