Silent failure — no error shown, wrong result on storefront

Product names show weird symbols after export — é turned into é, apostrophes look wrong

You exported your products, made some changes, re-imported — and now your storefront has strange garbage characters where the accents and apostrophes used to be. Shopify didn't warn you. The import said it worked. But your product names and descriptions look scrambled to every customer who visits your store.

fix-shopify-products · xlsx-for-ai

Fixing it

The repair is to re-read the file interpreting the characters correctly, then save it back in the right format. Upload your file to the Shopify products CSV repair tool and it will detect the character problem, convert the affected cells back to the correct text, and give you a repaired file in the format Shopify expects. The ledger will show you which fields were changed and what the text looks like after repair — so you can confirm your accented characters are back before you upload.

Going forward: if you need to edit your Shopify export in a spreadsheet, use Google Sheets (paste the CSV content there) or open the file in Excel using the Data → From Text/CSV import wizard and explicitly choose 8-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-8). That prevents the character problem from happening in the first place.

How to tell this happened to you

This is a silent failure — Shopify won't show an error during the import. You'll only spot it by looking at the storefront after the upload. Check a product that had an accent character (like a French, Spanish, or German word, or a product name with an apostrophe or em dash). If you see any of these, you have the problem:

  • é showing as é
  • ' (curly apostrophe) showing as ’
  • – (dash) showing as â€"
  • Any letter with an accent replaced by a two- or three-character mess starting with à or â€

What went wrong — in plain language

Your Shopify export file is saved in a format called 8-bit Unicode Transformation Format (UTF-8), which can represent every character in every language. The problem happens when you open that file in Excel on Windows. Excel often opens CSV files in a different format — one that was designed for older, English-only software — and when you save it back to CSV, the accent characters get translated into the wrong thing.

The characters aren't lost. They're still in the file. But they've been scrambled by the translation process. When Shopify reads them back in, it puts the scrambled version into your store.

Your original product data probably had perfectly correct characters. The file just passed through a step that didn't handle them properly.

This is especially common with

  • Products whose names include French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, or Scandinavian words
  • Product descriptions that used curly quotes or apostrophes (the "smart" kind that word processors add automatically)
  • Any product body text that was written in a rich text editor or copied from a website
  • Files that were opened and re-saved in Excel more than once (each round-trip can make it worse)

Why it doesn't always show up in the spreadsheet

When you open the damaged file back in Excel, Excel reads it using the same wrong format it used to write it — so the characters look fine to you. The damage only becomes visible when something reads the file correctly, the way Shopify does. That's why the file looks okay in your spreadsheet but looks broken on the storefront.