How to Export Shopify Products to CSV
A CSV is what buyers ask for when they want to import your range into their own ordering or stock system. It's not as polished as a PDF catalogue, but for a certain type of buyer — retailers with proper purchasing software — it's what they actually use. Here's what they need, and how Shopify's built-in export compares to what you should be sending.
When a buyer asks for a CSV
Larger retailers often work from a purchasing system that imports supplier product data directly. They're not going to retype 200 SKUs from a PDF — they'll ask for a CSV they can import. If you can't provide one quickly, the order goes to a supplier who can. That's the practical reason CSVs matter for wholesale.
What Shopify's built-in product export includes
Shopify lets you export all products as a CSV from Products → Export. The problem is that export is designed for Shopify-to-Shopify transfers, not for buyers. It includes fields like:
- Handle, Title, Body HTML
- Vendor, Product Category, Tags
- Variant SKU, Price, Compare at Price
- Option names and values (Size, Color, etc.)
- Image URLs (not embedded images)
That raw export has everything — and that's exactly the problem. It includes internal fields buyers don't need (HTML descriptions, Shopify handles, metafields), it shows your retail price rather than a trade price, and it exposes internal data you probably don't want to share.
What a buyer-facing CSV should contain
| Column | Notes |
|---|---|
| Product name | Clean title, no HTML |
| SKU / Style code | Their reference for ordering |
| Variants | Separate columns for size, colour, etc. |
| Trade price | What they pay — not your retail price |
| RRP | Recommended retail, so they can see their margin |
| Availability | In stock, available to order, or discontinued |
| MOQ | Minimum order quantity if applicable |
Strip everything else. A buyer's CSV isn't a database dump — it's a clean data file they can act on.
The cost price risk
Whatever you do, don't accidentally include your cost price in a buyer-facing export. If your Shopify admin stores cost of goods, double-check that any export you send has that column removed.