Guide
Can you import listings to Etsy with a CSV file?
No. Etsy has no CSV import for creating listings, and it never has. The CSV Etsy hands you is an export of listings that already exist, which is why so much advice about "uploading a CSV to Etsy" describes something that does not exist.
What Etsy's CSV actually is
Under Shop Manager → Settings → Options → Download Data, Etsy will give you a CSV of your existing listings. It only goes one way. There is no page anywhere in Shop Manager that takes a CSV back and turns the rows into listings, and Etsy's own help pages do not describe one.
The confusion makes sense. eBay has File Exchange. Shopify has a documented product CSV import. Amazon has flat files. Etsy is the odd one out among the big marketplaces, and plenty of blog posts about "bulk uploading to Etsy" are quietly describing one of the others.
So how does anyone create listings in bulk?
Three ways, and only three. If you want the practical version rather than the explanation, the step by step is on its own page.
- By hand, in Shop Manager. Fine for ten products. Painful for a hundred.
- Etsy's API. Etsy has an Open API that can create listings. Using it directly means registering an app, getting through Etsy's approval, and writing code against OAuth. Real work, and the only first-party route to bulk creation.
- A third-party listing tool. Several exist, and most of them work by holding an Etsy connection on your behalf and calling that same API. Plenty of them accept a CSV, which is where the idea that "Etsy takes a CSV" comes from. The CSV goes to the tool. Not to Etsy.
What that means for a spreadsheet of products
If you keep your catalogue in a spreadsheet, and most sellers do, the CSV is still the right thing to have. It just is not the last step. It is what you hand to whichever importer you use, or what you read off while you fill the form in yourself.
That is the shape listWright is built around. It reads the spreadsheet you already keep and writes the copy: a title, a description and tags for each product, all of it checked against the limits below before it comes back. What you get is a CSV laid out like Etsy's own listings download, because that is the shape sellers recognise and the shape the third-party importers are built to read.
The limits worth knowing before you write anything
These apply whichever route you take, and they are the ones that most often send a bulk upload back:
| Field | Limit |
|---|---|
| Title | 140 characters |
| Tags | 13 per listing |
| Tag length | 20 characters each |
A tag cannot contain a comma, which matters more than it sounds like it should. A comma inside an unquoted field shifts every column after it, and the row lands in the importer with the description sitting in the price column. There is more on fitting a phrase into 20 characters, which is the limit people hit first.
One thing to check in any CSV before you import it
A cell that begins with =, +, @ or
a tab gets treated as a formula the moment the file opens in Excel or
Google Sheets. In a product feed it is usually a product name starting
with a plus sign, and the result is a listing whose title reads
#NAME?.
The usual advice is to prefix the cell with an apostrophe. Do not. The apostrophe travels into the importer as part of the value and ends up in the live listing. Fix the source row instead. listWright refuses these outright for exactly that reason.
It is also only one of the ways a CSV arrives broken. The quieter ones are done to your file by the spreadsheet you opened it in, and those are worth reading before you build a feed.
If you are looking for the format
The columns listWright reads, and what each one becomes, are on the help page. No required column names: it reads whatever your sheet already has.
Etsy changes its tooling from time to time. This page describes how things stood when it was written. If Etsy has since added a CSV import, it will be in their own help pages before it is in ours.