Shopify Store Importer Problems
Recently Creative Intelligence did some problem solving for Kawaii Boutiqueus after they used the native free Shopify Store Importer to transfer the sites’ products, images, and customers from BigCommerce.
Although the Shopify Store Importer is a recent and welcome addition to the Shopify tools it is, as of so far, less than perfect. This is a good example where the Shopify Store Importer has done a decent job, but the import did not pull over all the necessary product fields.
In this case, the Shopify Store Importer did pull over the product and variant structures but did not pull over barcodes or weights from BigCommerce.
Creative Intelligence is always happy to take on relatively small projects like this, where it is necessary to fill in the information/field gaps that have been left by the importer.
In our experience, this type of issue with the importer is not contained to just BigCommerce store imports, but we have seen similar issues with all of the currently supported store types that we have tried; BigCommerce, LightSpeed, WooCommerce, Squarespace, Mailchimp, Shopify, Shopkeep, Etsy, Big Cartel, Square, and PrestaShop.
Since writing this post, we have experienced many other issues with the Shopify Store Importer. If you are using the importer watch out for control characters in the product descriptions (including TM). The importer does not handle these well, and you end up with hex codes in the Shopify product handle which cannot be changed post-migration. This will also have a negative effect when you try to implement 301 and other redirects.
Another issue that has arisen is the Shopify 20 Megapixel image size limitation. Leaving aside the fact that you shouldn’t be using images this size, the importer appears to import the associated product without reporting the image error. Obviously, you need to watch out for this and download the offending images manually, resize them, and upload them into Shopify. Although Shopify has this 20 Megapixel limit, the majority of the other platforms do not have this limit and we see a lot of ridiculously large product images out there.
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