I wanted to update unit pricing on several variants in several products. I tried doing this with the variant bulk editor but it always gives me this error:
Matrixify also doesn’t support unit pricing yet, so I resorted to using Shopify’s native product CSV import. Big mistake! For some reason, on every product that had multiple options(Size and Color or whatever), some of the variants got deleted. I still don’t know why. We didn’t get any error message or anything informing us that this happened, we just had to discover it ourselves.
This is NOT ACCEPTABLE!!! I don’t see any reason why my import file should have caused the deletion of any variants. They were all there as you can see. And IF an import would result in the deletion of anything, the user should be explicitly told that this is going to happen! Shopify fix this!
You probably might have ended up doing something wrong in the CSV file which caused that, I highly suggest you to not edit your products via CSV bulk until and unless you have a good experience of using Excel.
To fix your current problem, if I was at your place what I would do is download that csv file again which Shopify emailed you and import that same CSV file and make sure while importing you check the first option so that it gets overwrite instead of duplicated products.
Well whoever fault it was, we can’t do anything about it now. But the good part is that you have the backup file of your variants so you can just simply run that original CSV again and most likely you’ll get your variants back which will save most of your time.
Shopify has no native backup system, so it’s on the merchant to put a backup process in place.
It doesn’t just preserve data is prevents unneeded frustration so merchants don’t even have to think about it.
Just shaking your fist at the clouds here.
For actual bugs contact shopify support directly or have the merchant(admin) do it.
Give them replicatable bugs or be dismissed as user error https://help.shopify.com/
Make a sample CSV of before and after that can reproduce the issue, or find similar posts that do have data.
Otherwise no matter how big mad you feel it will be dismissed as user error.
e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example
Test imports first.
It’s a system it uses logic to update and remove variants.
Otherwise how would merchants have to bulk remove variants.
I did tell Shopify support. I’m just also making a thread about it. And I did test importing first, I just didn’t specifically test multiple-option variants which is where the problem is.
But yes Paul please keep coming up with reasons why I’m at fault here.
All my products have multiple variants, and have exported, imported, and changed values many times every month without any such issue. Perhaps you did something wrong there. Maybe a mistep. Maybe there was something corrupted in your csv file. It happens sometimes. In any case, you seem bent out of shape, you are welcome to come cool off in the snow
I’d rather blame your sizes which include quote marks for sizes in feet.
Because quotes are usually used to wrap text fields.
In fact, Excel does a very bad job of escaping tricky characters.
I always prefer Google Sheets for final export to CSV before getting it into Shopify.
And no, it’s not a Shopify problem when it’s fed wrong data.
Sorry to hear the variants got deleted, the Shopify admin import is always a bit flakey. I did try a few times to reproduce the issue on a test store and it seemed to work but it’s very sensitive to small things so I might have missed something. Either way, it’s very opaque and hard to see what’s being modified.
I know it’s too late for this case, but to use the Matrixify format, while also updating unit prices, I would suggest checking out our Altera app. It supports the Matrixify format while also adding support for newer fields like Unit Prices.
For example, this is what an export could look like and you can also import that data to update products:
It appears to me that you have formatted the Excel file incorrectly.
Variants shouldn’t have all of the information duplicated.
I would suggest creating a single product of what you want on the store with two variants, and then export that product and modify that file with your additional products and variants while keeping the same format of the original file.
For a CSV update that touched unit pricing but ended up deleting variants, I would treat this as a variant-structure problem first, not just a pricing problem.
Here is the checklist I would run before attempting another import:
Start from a fresh export taken after the damage, and keep a separate copy of the last known-good export. Do not sort or delete rows in the file you plan to import.
For each affected handle, confirm the first row for that handle is the product row: it should contain the title and the product-level fields. The following rows with the same handle should be variant/image rows, not a new product start.
If you include any variant-level field such as price, unit price, SKU, weight, inventory, or variant image, also include the option identity columns needed to identify the variant: Option1 name, Option1 value, and Option2/Option3 columns if the product uses them.
Check for duplicate option combinations inside each handle. Shopify identifies variants by the option values, so two rows that resolve to the same Size/Color combination are dangerous even if the SKUs differ.
Remove columns you are not intentionally updating. In Shopify CSV imports, included blank columns can overwrite existing data, while omitted non-required columns are generally left alone.
Test one affected product first with “Overwrite products with matching handles” selected, then inspect the variant count before running the full file.
The risky pattern is a partial update file that includes variant-dependent columns but does not preserve the exact option rows Shopify needs to match existing variants.
Before importing again, run any CSV preflight that can group rows by handle and report missing option pairs, duplicate option combinations, and repeated product-start rows for the same handle.
I don’t see any reason why my import file should have caused the deletion of any variants. They were all there as you can see. And IF an import would result in the deletion of anything, the user should be explicitly told that this is going to happen! Shopify fix this!
