CSV price import failing? The formatting problems behind most rejections

Short answer: nearly all CSV import failures are Excel doing something helpful to your data before it ever reaches the importer.

The usual suspects

Currency symbols and thousands separators. "£1,299.00" is text, not a number. Strip formatting and export plain values.

SKUs mangled into numbers or dates. Excel loves converting leading zeros away and reading certain codes as dates. Format SKU columns as Text before you open or save.

Wrong encoding. Accented characters and £ signs turn to mojibake without UTF-8. Save as CSV UTF-8 explicitly.

Header mismatch. Column names must match what the importer expects, exactly. Export a template first and fill that in rather than building your own.

Blank rows and stray columns. A single space in an unused cell extends the used range and produces phantom rows.

Half-imported files

If some rows landed and others did not, the failures are usually a handful of rows with a data problem. Import the rejects file, fix those rows, re-import just those — do not re-run the whole file blind.

The safer habit

Export, edit, re-import the same shape. And keep the grid — not the spreadsheet — as the system of record: CSVs are messengers.

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