Characters to avoid to fix missing products when importing CSV

Hi CO Community,

Short Answer: Replace commas (from the name and description fields) and carriage returns from the description fields.

Long Answer:
Just wanted to share my workaround to a peculiar problem I've seen in this forum regarding product updates not importing properly. On a monthly basis, I export a dump of my products in CSV format to tweak my pricing strategy, add barcodes, etc which I then bulk-load back into Checkout. I hired a new assistant recently who spent a few days in Checkout populating the description fields of each product with racking information so that we can more efficiently locate our many SKUs.

Upon performing my monthly bulk-load this month, I noticed the importer showing a preview of only ~90 products (when my CSV has approximately 1,200 SKUs). By taking a closer-look at the products that did preview in the importer, we noticed that it did not like commas in both the name and description fields. Doing a simple search and replace for commas immediately resulted in the importer showing almost all the SKUs. What we found interesting is that although Checkout may not like commas in the description (which users can learn to omit), it is Checkout that auto-populates the name field value with commas when you create products with variations (e.g. a toothbrush SKU that has 2 variations: Toothbrush, soft, red).

Finally, there was about a dozen products which still wouldn't import, and we simply found that it was carriage-returns in the description fields.

Anyway, long-winded observation and troubleshooting that worked for me. Hope this may help some of you out there :)

Suggestion to the CO team: If the devs could add something in the manual or knowledge base on what special characters don't work well with the importer, that would be very helpful. I also have a sneaking suspicion something happens when opening and saving CSV/XLS files in different versions of Microsoft Excel (I'm using 14.2.5, MS Excel for Mac 2011) which might cause problems for different users.