"My inventory is showing as 0 after import / products say out of stock" — tracker vs. quantity mismatch

What you'll see

New products show up correctly — title, price, images all fine — but every variant reads 0 in stock and the storefront shows "Sold out." No error mentions inventory anywhere in the import summary.

Two columns, one row, and a blank that reads as zero

Unlike the standalone inventory CSV, Shopify's product import CSV carries tracking and quantity as two columns on the very same variant row: Variant Inventory Tracker (must be exactly shopify to turn tracking on) and Variant Inventory Qty (the actual count). These two only work correctly together. If the tracker says shopify but the quantity cell is empty, Shopify doesn't leave the quantity undefined — it treats the blank as the number zero, and the new variant is created already out of stock.

This combination shows up constantly in hand-built product spreadsheets: a template or a copied row already has the tracker column filled in, but the actual stock count gets added later, row by row, as counts come in from a warehouse or supplier — and any row uploaded before its count arrives goes live as zero rather than being skipped.

How to verify and fix it

Check every row where Variant Inventory Tracker is shopify for a genuinely blank Variant Inventory Qty cell, not just a visually empty one — a cell containing a formula that resolved to an empty string will look the same in Excel but behaves differently on export. Fill in a real number, including an explicit 0 if the item really is out of stock, before uploading again.