Everything you need to know about the Matrixify format template. The template works in Excel, CSV and Google Sheets to manage your Shopify data in bulk.
Matrixify template Demo files and documentation
Here you can download Matrixify template Demo files and go to the related documentation page.
Each entity that can be imported is a separate sheet.
Using Matrixify: Excel format you can combine them into a single Excel file with multiple sheets.
| Sheet Name | Demo File | Documentation |
|---|---|---|
| Products | ||
| Smart Collections | ||
| Custom Collections | ||
| Customers | ||
| Companies | ||
| Discounts | ||
| Draft Orders | ||
| Orders | ||
| Payouts | Exported only | |
| Pages | ||
| Blog Posts | ||
| Redirects | ||
| Activity | Exported only | |
| Files | ||
| Shop |
Supported formats
The formats that can be imported:
- Matrixify: Excel
- Matrixify: CSV (zipped or not zipped)
- Matrixify: Google Sheets (from Google Sheets shared public link)
Other external formats that can be imported:
“Matrixify: Excel” Format
Using the Matrixify app you can import and export Excel XLSX file with multiple sheets in it!
That data is organized in clear and human-readable tables, as several sheets.
The same file can be exported and imported.
One Excel file can hold several kinds of Shopify data items like Products, Customers, and so on.
Inside the Excel file, there are sheets (tabs at the bottom). Sheet names tell the app what kind of data is inside each sheet.
Excel sheet name
In XLSX file you can import multiple sheets at the same time so the file name does not matter, but you will need to specify sheet/tab name in the file for each sheet.
The sheet/tab name in Excel file can contain other words, but if your file will have two sheets – “Products” and “Products data” then the app will only import “Products” and ignore “Products data“.
To import Customers the sheet name must contain the word “customers”, to import Blog Posts the sheet name must contain “blog posts”, etc.
You can import multiple sheets with different entities as long as the sheet/tab names are set correctly.
All the other sheets are ignored, so you can keep your reference data sheets also in the same file.
Columns and rows
In each sheet, the data is arranged in columns and rows.
Values
Values in cells correspond to appropriate field value for that item. Sometimes values are text, sometimes numbers, sometimes TRUE or FALSE (which means yes or no).
Usually, when you enter that data into Excel, it will automatically understand, what is a text, what is a number, and what is TRUE or FALSE.
Columns
Those columns are basically the same data fields as you fill through Shopify Admin. For example, Product columns would be Handle, Title, Vendor, and so on.
Imports don’t need to have all columns – the app will update only those fields, which columns you are importing. If you have the column with an empty value, the app will set that field value to empty. So if you don’t want to change a field value, then remove the column from the import.
When you are updating data, sometimes you want to update just one field, like for example, product price. In that case, you can remove all the other columns, and the app will update only this one field, and leave other fields unchanged.
Column order doesn’t matter.
You can have your own additional columns – the app will just ignore the columns it doesn’t know.
Column colors
Columns have colors, and those are visual indicators for you how those columns group logically together. When importing, the column colors are ignored.
When viewing import results, it will also color those columns. The columns that have white color means that those were ignored, the app didn’t know what that is.
Rows
Rows correspond to items in Shopify. Basically, one row is one item in Shopify (except, when you need more rows for one item).
Items that need several rows
For example, for Products, you might need several rows per product, if the product has several images or several variants. For Customers, you can have several rows, because one Customer can have several addresses. Smart Collections can have several Rules. And so on.
In case of Products, each new variant and each exported image will go in its own row. However, you can import several images by splitting them with the semicolon (;).
For the app to know that the row belongs to the same item, it needs to have either the same ID value, or the same Handle value (if ID is empty), or the same Title (if Handle is empty).
The ID is the unique number that Shopify generates for each item. When you create new items, leave it empty – Shopify will generate them for you. The ID is used when you need to update existing items – this ID will allow the app to identify which item you need to update.
When you repeat rows, you can just copy them down with all the values also for those columns, where only one value per item is needed. For example, if you will copy the same Title value for all the Variants rows, the app will use the only value from the first row and will ignore the rest.
You can tell by the column color and by its starting name that it belongs to repeated row. For example, all variant columns start with “Variant …” and are the same color.
When importing, the file must be sorted so that repeated rows for the same item are together (sorted by ID, Handle, or Title). Because, as soon as ID or Handle, or Title will change, it will be treated as next item.
Don’t have Excel?
If you don’t have Excel, you can use Google Sheets, and then go to File -> Download as -> Microsoft Excel (.xlsx).
Or you can just import directly from the Google Sheets URL – like in this tutorial: Schedule import to Shopify from Google Sheets.
Or you can edit the Excel file in other apps, like, Numbers (for MacOS), OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc.
“Matrixify: CSV” Format
If your store is so large that Excel file doesn’t fit all the data and might exceed Excel limitations, you can use the “Matrixify: CSV” format, which has no size limitation at all – it can hold data well exceeding several millions of rows.
The most notable Excel limitations that exported data can break are:
- Total number of rows: 1 048 576 rows – can be exceeded if exporting really large sets of data, for example, above 800 000 Products.
- Total number of columns: 16 384 columns – usually broken only if you have an exceptionally large amount of Metafields.
- Total number of characters that a cell can contain: 32 767 characters – this can be broken by exporting long Metafields or Body HTML (descriptions)
Here you can find an official list of all Excel limitations.
This format is organized the same way as Matrixify Excel file, with the following differences:
- It is a zip file that contains CSV files.
- Each sheet inside the zip file is a separate CSV file. For example “Products.csv”, “Smart Collections.csv”, and so on. In this case, the CSV file name inside the zip file matters – the same as the Sheet names in the Excel file. It’s the way how you tell the app, what data in which file.
- CSV file column delimiter is the comma (,), and all text values are in double-quotes (“). Files are UTF-8 encoded. That ensures that Excel will always open them correctly without any special conversion.
- When importing, it is best that you zip the CSV file(s). That way they become more than 10x smaller and as a result – your upload is 10x faster. But you can import also plain CSV files – just they should be named according to Matrixify sheet naming rules.
CSV file name
Since the CSV file can only contain one sheet, then the app will read the filename to understand what you are importing.
The file name should contain the entity that you wish to import, but you can also have other words in the file name.
Here are some examples:
- “my-shopify-products.csv” – the app will see word “products” and assume that you are importing “Products“.
- “these-are-discounts_2019-12.csv” – here the app will understand to import “Discounts“.
- “my-july-smart-collections.csv” – The app will read and understand that you are importing “Smart Collections“.
You can also upload multiple sheets the CSV file by compressing all the CSV sheets into the ZIP file.
The app would still look into each CSV files name.
The app will auto-detect CSV file encoding, like UTF-8, ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1), ISO-2022-JP, etc., and automatically convert to UTF-8 as needed for Shopify.
“Shopify: CSV” Format
The app can import the Shopify Products CSV and Customers CSV which you can export from the Admin.
To make it smaller, you can zip it and upload the zipped file.
The app will read data from these files same as from Matrixify CSV file so the file naming would need to be the same.
CSV file column delimiter is the comma (,), and all text values are in double-quotes (“).
“Shopify Transporter” Format
You can also import Shopify Transporter CSV files for Products, Customers and Orders.
See the page on How to import Shopify Transporter CSV files.
“Matrixify: Google Sheets” Format
You can prepare your Google Sheets file in the exact way as you prepare the “Matrixify: Excel” file.
Then share this sheet to be accessible as view only by the public. And paste that URL in the app.
Read more in this tutorial: Schedule import to Shopify from Google Sheets.
