$29.99 or 1,299.00 in your price column is breaking the import
You typed the prices exactly as you'd write them on a price tag — dollar sign in front, comma for thousands — and now Shopify either rejects the file or imports every product with a $0 price. This isn't a bug. Shopify is very specific about price format, and both of those characters are treated as errors.
The fix: strip the symbol and the comma
Remove the dollar sign and the thousands-comma from every price. The Variant Price column in a Shopify Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file must contain a plain number and nothing else — just digits and, if needed, a decimal point:
- Correct:
29.99 - Correct:
1299.00 - Breaks import:
$29.99 - Breaks import:
1,299.00 - Breaks import:
USD 29.99
The currency is set at the store level — it's not part of the CSV row. So there's never a correct reason to put a currency symbol in that column.
If you only have a handful of rows, you can remove the dollar signs and commas by hand. For a larger file, upload it to the Shopify products CSV repair tool. It finds every Variant Price and Variant Compare At Price cell that has formatting characters, strips them, and gives you back a clean file with a plain-language list of every price it touched — so you can confirm the numbers look right before uploading to Shopify. Nothing in your file is changed silently: every price correction shows up in the "what I changed" ledger, with the before and after value, so you're not flying blind.
What actually happens when the format is wrong
The outcome depends on which character is present and how Shopify's import pipeline handles it at that moment:
- Dollar sign (
$29.99): Shopify usually can't parse this as a number and sets the variant price to0.00. Your products import but every single price shows as free. Shopify may not even flag it as an error — the import shows "success." - Comma as thousands separator (
1,299.00): Shopify may reject the row with "Variant price can't be blank" or silently truncate the value to1(treating the comma as the end of the number).
Both cases are quiet failures — Shopify doesn't always show a big red error. You may only notice when you check your storefront and every price reads $0.
Where this usually comes from
Most stores that hit this got their product data from one of a few places:
- A supplier spreadsheet that formatted prices as currency for human reading
- A Shopify export viewed in Excel, where Excel may have added currency formatting on top of the raw number
- A price list copy-pasted from a PDF or website, which naturally includes the dollar sign
In all of these cases the prices themselves are correct — the numbers are right — it's just the formatting around the number that needs to go.