I have tried reaching out to general support and they directed me to post my issue here -_-
For whatever reason a CSV I exported on the 1st of December as a backup for future edits now no longer wants to cooperate when importing to restore the products back to the saved data.
The CSV is unchanged from the exported version Shopify provided
The CSV provided does not have the correct variant images displayed
The CSV is only showing inventory for the smallest size of a particular product in inventory
Note: I use DSers for fulfillment management and to easily and somewhat quickly import our products. If this makes any difference
Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have uploaded a snippet of the CSV down below for anyone to review and test if they wish.
Thanks for the excellent response time, the file I exported was dated the 1st of December 23. Initially to only be used as a backup, the file was generated by Shopify itself and has not been amended in any way, shape or form.
Hi Xena:
You’re finding out why we built Rewind to backup Shopify stores. The CSV export is not a backup solution - it’s an export, but it’s not a backup. One (of many) problems with thinking that the CSV is a backup is that it doesn’t give you a copy of your product images. If you notice on line 3 of your file, the image in column Y doesn’t exist when you click on it.
It’s been deleted from Shopify’s system.
When you import that file back, it’s going to that URL to load the image, but since it’s been deleted it can’t load it, so the image doesn’t come back (that’s why you see problem 2 that you describe above).
When you use a backup app like Rewind, we save a copy of your product images, so when you need to restore a product we can bring back all the details, including the product images.
I don’t know why the inventory is coming back with only the smallest size - my guess would be that it’s related to the inventory policy in the export (which is set to deny).
Using Rewind app is good. But since it only has the exported CSV file to restore, the products have already been deleted. What we did is find and replace all image URLs from ../products/ to ../deleted/products/. Shopify still keeps the deleted images but not too long. Hope this trick helps.
Thanks for the responses although unfortunately so far none of these were of much help and I have discovered and fixed the issue the best possible way for now.
If you encounter the same issue with the variant images, feel free to use this script I generated with ChatGPT. The script is Python and I’m not an expert so if you really need assistance getting this going, let me know.
Essentially the script checks each link, if the link is broken giving you a ‘404’ error, it will append /deleted/ into the link as Shopify for some reason still stores the information/images. This will need to be run on a downloaded export of the store with the links present, of course. This is not a bulletproof or even ideal fix, but for 99% of my missing content, this worked and I am happy with that.
The inventory issue is with my importer, Dsers… Upon mass editing/correcting variants of about 1000 products and their descriptions a ‘link’ was broken from the imported product, Dsers and Aliexpress. This required me to manually re-map each product and… bleep that, I do not have the time so I turned off inventory tracking for the time being.
You may be asking, “how were the images deleted in the first place from the import”. Now, this one was my doing, inadvertently I had sorted my Google Sheet from A-Z for some of the fixes instead of searching and replacing (made it easier to locate errors) and as a result this ‘deleted’ about 20,000 variants in the process. How fun.
With all of this mentioned, this all could have been avoided would Shopify have an option to undo massive edits and potentially backup data themselves, I am sure with our subscription funds they can afford this to happen atleast once a day or after a significant change from a user as this could have easily been reverted.