Shopify CSV UTF-8 Encoding: Fix Accents, Emoji and Broken Characters
If product titles contain ’ instead of an apostrophe, or accented words appear as replacement symbols, the first thing to inspect is character encoding. Shopify's product-import documentation requires UTF-8. Saving as a legacy system encoding and later opening the file under a different character set can corrupt multilingual catalogs.
Example: why this problem happens
A vendor file contains “Café crème – été”. After import, product titles become “Café crème”. The symptom appears on many records, not just one SKU, indicating a transformation problem rather than missing product data.
Diagnose the issue
| Text | Expected output | Potential encoding issue |
|---|---|---|
Café crème | Accents preserved | Mojibake such as Café |
Niño | Name preserved | Replacement glyphs or question marks |
€19.00 | Correct symbol in descriptive text | Do not place currency symbols in numeric Price fields |
Step-by-step: what to do
- Keep the original file and determine whether it is already corrupted. A correctly exported file cannot restore characters lost earlier in the source system.
- In the spreadsheet application, choose the CSV UTF-8 export option, not a platform-default CSV encoding where they differ.
- Inspect product titles and sample descriptions in a UTF-8 text editor. Include examples with accented letters and curly quotation marks in your test sample.
- If Excel displays misleading characters because it guessed the encoding incorrectly, import the text with an explicitly chosen UTF-8 encoding rather than repeatedly opening and resaving.
- Run a small Shopify import and compare the exact published title and description against your backup.
Changing the file extension to .csv does not change the file's encoding. Also avoid automatic transliteration that erases brand names, legal marks or meaningful accents.
Can our free tools help?
Common question
Does a UTF-8 BOM mean my file is invalid?
A BOM is a recognizable encoding marker; the primary concern is that the underlying character bytes and CSV quoting parse correctly. Test the actual import.
Official source and further reading
This explanation is independent and is not an official Shopify specification. Confirm current product import requirements in Shopify Help Center: importing products with CSV before changing a production catalog.
Browse the SellerFile CSV guide library or practice with synthetic CSV sample files.