Accents turned into question marks in Shopify product names
You typed café, José, or Über correctly. Shopify shows caf?, Jos?, or ?ber instead — a literal question mark standing in for every accented letter. That's not random damage; it's what happens when a file gets written in one text encoding and read back in another. Drop your file in below and the free checker will flag every affected cell before you upload again.
What you'll see
Every accented letter in a product title or description — é, ñ, ü, ç, and similar characters — shows up as a plain question mark: caf? instead of café, Jos? instead of José. The import itself completes with no error. Shopify accepts the row and creates or updates the product; it just stores the wrong character. Note that this is different from garbled multi-character sequences like é or ’ in place of a single accent — that's a related but separate encoding failure (bytes misread through the wrong codepage rather than replaced outright). Here, one bad character becomes exactly one question mark, because "?" is the standard fallback substitution character used when a byte can't be mapped during a lossy text conversion.
The root cause (plain language)
Shopify's product CSV importer expects the file to be encoded as UTF-8 — the character encoding that can represent essentially any letter, in any language, using one to four bytes per character. Excel has two different "save as CSV" options that look nearly identical but behave very differently: CSV (Comma delimited), the plain option, and CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited), added in Excel 2016. The plain option typically writes the file using your operating system's legacy codepage — Windows-1252 on most English-language Windows installs. Windows-1252 can represent é, ñ, and ü just fine, but it represents them with different byte values than UTF-8 does. When Shopify's importer reads that file and interprets every byte as UTF-8 (because that's what it's told to expect, correctly or not), the accented character's byte sequence doesn't correspond to anything renderable, so it gets replaced with a question mark.
How to check
Upload your file to the checker above. It reads the actual bytes in your product Title, Body (HTML), and other text columns and flags every cell where a question mark has replaced what was almost certainly an accented character, before anything reaches Shopify.
How to fix it
Re-open your original file — not the one that already shows question marks, since that data is already lost — and re-export it using Excel's File → Save As → CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) option specifically, not the plain "CSV (Comma delimited)" option just above it in the list. If you're not sure which one you used last time, or you no longer have the original with correct accents, editing and exporting the file from Google Sheets is a safe alternative — Sheets writes UTF-8 by default and doesn't have this dual-option trap. Re-check the accented names before re-uploading, since a question mark that's already been imported into Shopify won't fix itself on the next successful-looking upload unless the source data is corrected first.