Inventory values deleted from .csv upload

Retired Boards Appdev Fulfillment Api

Topic summary

A merchant exported their product catalog to CSV to change clothing size option names from Arabic to English (e.g., “X-Large” to “XL”). Despite Shopify’s warnings that inventory quantities wouldn’t be affected during CSV re-import, all inventory values for 1500+ clothing items across both managed locations were unexpectedly deleted.

Key details:

  • Only option names and values were modified in the CSV
  • No changes were made to SKUs, handles, or other product data
  • The “inventory qty” column was not included in either the exported or imported file

Current status:

  • The merchant has contacted Shopify support and is awaiting response
  • They’re concerned about being unable to restore inventory values
  • Another user (ShopMatt) reports experiencing the same issue

The merchant is seeking suggestions for fixes that don’t require manually recounting entire inventory.

Summarized with AI on November 5. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I exported all my products to .csv file and edited the option name for all clothes because the store was missing some functionality due to the option name (size) being in Arabic, and shopify/theme built the infrastructure around understanding English “Size”.

Anyways, I changed the option name to the English “Size” and changed some of the variants option value for example: X-Large changed it to XL - for all products.

I was comforted by the fact that while exporting and re-importing my .csv file shopify always announced that inventory values will not be changed, I was further comforted by the fact that “inventory qty” column was not included in the exported nor the imported. No changes were made to SKUs or handles or any other data besides option name and value.

To my surprise this change deleted ALL inventory values of clothing items 1500+ in both locations I manage. I’m devastated and worried that I won’t be able to restore my inventory values. I fully blame shopify for not thinking that this could happen regardless of uploading the .csv file from the products.

I contacted Shopify’s support and waiting to hear back.

Has anyone faced a similar issue? Any suggestions for fixes that do not include counting the entire inventory?

Thanks

2

Did you ever get a solution to this? Same thing happened to me.