Reference
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Three ways to get products in
Upload a sheet. The rest of this page is about that, and it is the right tool for a catalogue.
Type them in. A grid, one product per row, and you name the columns. Nothing to download and nothing to upload. For a handful of products it is quicker than making a file.
Connect your Etsy shop. Your live listings come in as products, ready to be rewritten, and the new copy can go back to them. Optional, off until you turn it on, and one click to remove.
All three end up in the same place, and a product is the same product whichever way it arrived.
What the sheet needs
One row per product, and a header row on top. There are no required column names: whatever you already keep is what the copy gets written from. If one of your columns identifies the product (a sku, a code, a handle) it is used as that product's stable key, and that key is what lets a second upload update a listing instead of duplicating it. The same is true of a product you type in: fill the sku box and you can edit that product later instead of creating a second one.
If you would rather see one than read about it, take a sheet. Each has three products in it and the columns that do something on that marketplace. Open it, put your own rows in, upload it.
Etsy sample Shopify sample eBay sample Amazon sample
None of these columns are compulsory, and nothing is refused for missing one. What changes is what the file you get back can carry: a row with no price leaves the price column of the export empty, because the only other option is inventing one.
| Column | What it does | Etsy | Shopify | eBay | Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sku | Your own code for the product. This is the key: upload the sheet again and a row with the same sku updates that listing instead of making a second one. | writing only | writing only | writing only | writing only |
| name | What the thing is. Most of the writing is built from this, so a plain description beats a clever one. | writing only | writing only | writing only | writing only |
| material | What it is made of. | MATERIALS | writing only | C:Material | writing only |
| colour | The colour a buyer would search for. | writing only | writing only | C:Colour | writing only |
| size | Dimensions, capacity, or the size on the label. | writing only | writing only | C:Size | writing only |
| brand | Your shop or maker name. | writing only | Vendor | C:Brand | brand_name |
| type | The kind of thing it is, one or two words. | writing only | Type | writing only | writing only |
| price | The number only. No currency symbol: a cell starting with a symbol is a cell a spreadsheet may read as a formula. | PRICE | Variant Price | *StartPrice | standard_price |
| currency | The three letter code your shop prices in. Left blank it stays blank, because guessing USD for a shop priced in GBP is a wrong number on a live product page. | CURRENCY_CODE | writing only | writing only | writing only |
| quantity | How many you have. | QUANTITY | Variant Inventory Qty | *Quantity | quantity |
“Writing only” is not a lesser job. Nothing on this list is required, and every column you keep is read by the thing writing your copy, whether or not the marketplace has a box for it. A sheet that says the mug holds 350ml gets a listing that says so.
What happens to it
Each row becomes one job. Copy gets written for it, then checked against the category's limits before anything is kept: title length, how many tags, how long each tag may be. A listing that breaks a rule comes back marked failed with the rule sitting next to it, so you can fix the row and retry. Retrying is free. The credit went when the run was created.
Why a row might be skipped
If a product's row has not changed since the last time it was generated, it gets skipped instead of written again. That is what keeps re-uploading a whole catalogue cheap: you only pay for the rows you actually edited.
The file you get back
That depends on where you said it was going, because the four marketplaces want four different things.
| Marketplace | What you get |
|---|---|
| Etsy | a CSV shaped like Etsy's own listings download: title, description, price, currency, quantity, tags, materials, image urls and sku |
| Shopify | a product import file, with the meta title, meta description and url handle filled, every product a draft |
| eBay | File Exchange columns with item specifics filled, as a draft: the category and condition are yours to add |
| Amazon | the flat file core, to paste into the category template you download from Seller Central |
Only Shopify's uploads exactly as it stands. Etsy has no native CSV import for creating listings, and eBay and Amazon both need something only you can supply. So treat what you get as something to review, and as the file you hand to whichever importer or integration you already use. Nothing is posted to your shop from here.
That last part catches people off guard often enough that it has its own page: can you import listings to Etsy with a CSV? The practical route from a spreadsheet to live listings is set out step by step here, and Shopify's importer has a page too, because its Handle column will merge two products into one if you let it.
If your sheet does not state a currency, the currency column comes back empty. Better blank than guessed at.
Cells that start with = + @ or a tab
Open a file like that in a spreadsheet and those cells turn into formulas on the spot, so we refuse them outright instead of escaping them. Escaping sounds tidier until you see the result: the escape character rides along into whatever imports the file, and ends up in the listing.
That is one of six ways a product CSV goes wrong, and the others are harder to spot because your spreadsheet makes them for you. They are all on one page, with a checklist to run before you upload anything.
The limits your listings are checked against
Whichever marketplace you picked, and they are not close to each other. An Etsy title runs to 140 characters where an eBay title stops at 80. Etsy gives you 13 tags at 20 characters each; Amazon gives you 250 bytes and eBay gives you no tag field at all. All four are in one table here.
The Etsy limits have pages of their own, since they are the ones asked about most: titles and tags.
The copy itself is written by a model, which is fast and consistent and occasionally states something about your product that you never told it. What that looks like, and the five questions that catch it, is worth a minute before you publish a batch.
Listings you already have
None of the above applies to them, so there is a separate check for it. Upload the listings your shop already carries and every row is scored against the rules above, free and without generating anything. What the audit looks at, and what no checker can tell you.
What happens to your data
Set out in the privacy notice, including what is stored, what is sent to the model that writes the copy, and what is not collected at all.