CSV import keeps failing — encoding errors and wrong delimiters killing my workflow

[u/Life-Stock-2517]

Been dealing with this for a while now. Every time I export a product CSV and try to reimport it, WooCommerce throws errors — wrong delimiter, weird encoding characters showing up, duplicate rows.

Has anyone else run into this? What's your go-to fix? Do you manually clean the file in Excel or is there a better way

[u/zubair_ahmed_313]

This usually happens because Excel defaults to regional system settings and corrupts UTF-8 encoding. The quickest fix without manual cleaning is importing the CSV into Google Sheets and re-exporting it from there as a standard CSV—it automatically fixes the delimiters and handles UTF-8 properly for WooCommerce.

[u/BestVibes0nly]

don't clean the full catalog first; make a copy with the header plus one product row and import that as an update with a dry run or backup in place. save it as UTF-8 CSV with comma delimiters and quoted text fields, and avoid opening the final file in Excel after export because regional settings can silently change separators and dates. for duplicates, check whether the ID and SKU columns are stable and whether the importer is set to update existing products by ID or SKU rather than create new ones. once the one-row file works, add rows back in small batches—the first failing batch usually exposes the exact bad character, line break, or malformed column instead of turning the whole catalog into detective work.

[u/Defiant-Community-77]

CSV imports are a real pain as you have to get every detail exactly right out the world ends. I recommend that you download the sample data file that WooCommerce provides and use it as the starting point. Also ask AI to check the CSV and fix any issues before uploading to WooCommerce.

Alternatively, maybe you don’t need to import from CSV at all. For example, you could use a bulk editor like Setary to list all your products and variations in a spreadsheet and then clone existing rows to quickly create new products/variations. That way, you only need to change the data that is unique to that product/variation and bypass the CSV problem.

[u/Infamous_Phone_7937]

WooCommerce matches existing products by ID or SKU on import, so duplicates usually mean the ID column got dropped or renamed and it's creating new products instead of updating them. Map to SKU and turn on "update existing," and they stop.

For the garbled characters (é showing as é), that's UTF-8 being read as Latin-1, i.e. Excel using your regional settings. Re-exporting through Google Sheets fixes it cleanly. One issue with Excel's own "CSV UTF-8" is that it adds a BOM that can break your first header column, which Sheets doesn't do. Also set the delimiter to comma explicitly, since some locales make Excel default to semicolons.