In trying to launch my Shopify store, I have 800 products to upload, and have worked with Shopify’s AI tool as well as two different humans to try to get my bulk uploads to show the Product using Shopify’s standard classification system. Here is the latest from the human with whom I have last worked who, like the first person, could not solve my problem: "Here is a full record of everything you’ve already tried, so the next person you speak with is fully up to speed:
What has been tried and is not working:
Column header Product category (lowercase c) — category stays blank
Column header Product Category (capital C) — category stays blank
No error message appears at any point. The category drops silently every time. This is not anything you are doing wrong." I will, for a third time, when I have a multi hour block of time this afternoon to again ask for help, but I am hoping that someone in the community can make a winning suggestion. I would be very grateful and you would save the purpose for assembling my team this coming Tuesday to introduce the new store.
The reliable fix is to stop guessing the format and let Shopify hand it to you. Set the category on one product manually with the category picker in admin, then export just that single product and look at the exact value Shopify wrote in the Product Category column. That string is guaranteed valid because it came from Shopify itself, so use it (and the exact header) as your template for all 800. Big catch though: don’t edit the file in Excel. Excel quietly mangles encoding, smart quotes, and the ampersand in “Home & Garden,” which is a classic cause of categories silently dropping. Run it through Google Sheets instead (import it, then File > Download > CSV), which clears those invisible issues.
Moeed’s advice is spot on. I’ve seen this exact issue with merchants I’ve worked with and it’s almost always Excel silently corrupting the CSV.
One more thing that might save you time with 800 products: check out Matrixify in the App Store. It handles bulk imports much more reliably than Shopify’s native CSV, supports product categories properly, and lets you import directly from an Excel file without the encoding issues. You’d need the Basic plan ($20/month) for that many products but you can cancel right after the import. Could save you hours of troubleshooting
Hello @web1305shop
I took a closer look at the CSV and the imported product.The category value Home & Garden > Decor > Vases`appears to be valid, and Shopify is successfully assigning it to the product after the import is completed. What’s interesting is that the Product Category field shows as blank in the import preview, even though the category data exists in the CSV and is ultimately imported correctly.Since the category is being applied to the product, this doesn’t seem to be a mapping issue with the CSV itself. It looks more like a limitation or display issue within Shopify’s import preview.While I can’t say for certain whether it’s a Shopify bug, the import process itself appears to be working as expected. If the category is showing correctly on the product after import, the blank preview field can likely be ignored.If you’d like to be completely sure, it may be worth reaching out to Shopify Support to confirm whether this is known behavior.
Building on @Moeed’s great tip. I always start small when I receive a problem. As he said, try with one product first, once it works, try it with 10, 50, 100, see if each time you’re adding more, if any issue occurs. It saves a lot more time than repeatedly trying with your 800 and having a problem. The problem might also occur somewhere in the middle of the 800 (for example).
I’d separate two things here: whether Shopify is actually importing the category, and whether the import preview is showing it correctly.
From what you’ve described, the scary part is that the category field stays blank during the upload flow, but that does not always mean the final product category will stay blank after the import finishes. Shopify’s preview can be misleading with taxonomy/category fields.
For your 800 products, I’d do one controlled test before touching the full file:
Create one product manually and set the exact category from Shopify’s category picker.
Export only that product.
Copy the exact Product Category value and header from Shopify’s own export into a 3-row test CSV.
Import those 3 rows, ignore the preview for a moment, and check the final product pages after the import completes.
If the products end up with the right category after import, then the issue is probably the preview/mapping display, not your CSV. If the final products are still blank, then I’d look for hidden differences in the header, Excel formatting, or copied taxonomy text.
Since you have a team meeting coming up, I would not run the 800-row import until you’ve proven this with a tiny batch. It should take the uncertainty out of whether you’re fighting a CSV problem or a Shopify preview bug.