How to export a Shopify store's products to CSV

What you can export

Every Shopify store publishes its product list. A shopper sees it as a collection page, and software can read it as data. The Shopify product exporter reads that public list and gives you a CSV you can open in a spreadsheet. It works on stores you do not own, because it only includes what the store already makes public.

You get one row per variant, with these columns: product title, handle, vendor, product type, tags, variant title, SKU, price, compare-at price, availability and the image URL. A T-shirt with six sizes becomes six rows.

The file is built in your browser for you to download. It is not stored on Checkout Club¹⁰¹. A store behind a password page has no public products, so there is nothing to export.

How to export and open the file

1. Paste the store URL into the exporter and run it.
2. Download the CSV.
3. Open it in Google Sheets or Excel. Add filters to the top row.
4. Sort and count. The questions below tell you what to look for.

Five questions the spreadsheet answers

1. What are their price bands? Sort by price and count how many products sit under $25, $25 to $50 and so on. A store with one hero product and a long tail looks different from one with many mid-price items.
2. How deep is the discounting? Filter for rows where compare-at price is higher than price. Divide the gap by the compare-at price. If most of the catalog is discounted, the compare-at price is a design choice, not a sale.
3. Which products do they push? Products with a compare-at price, the first items in a collection, and products with many variants are usually the ones they care about. Check the live ads with the competitor ads guide to confirm.
4. How do they structure variants? Count the variants per product, and look at how sizes, packs and bundles are named.
5. What is out of stock? Rows marked unavailable can show which products sell out, or which they have stopped supporting.

To count products rather than variants, count the unique values in the handle column.

Preparing the sheet

A raw export has one row per variant, so a few steps make it easier to read.

1. Freeze the top row and turn on filters so the column names stay visible.
2. Add a discount column. If compare-at price is in column H and price in column G, the formula =IF(H2>G2,(H2-G2)/H2,0) gives the discount as a fraction. Format the column as a percentage.
3. Add a price band column if you want a quick count: under 25, 25 to 50, 50 to 100, over 100.
4. Make a second tab with one row per product. Copy the handle column, remove duplicates, and use a lookup to pull the lowest price for each handle. This is the view for comparing products, not variants.

Check the column letters in your own file before you copy a formula. They depend on how the export is laid out.

Worked example

This is an invented catalog, used to show the steps. A store exports as 212 rows, which is 48 products. Sorting by price shows 30 products between $12 and $30, ten between $30 and $60 and eight above $60. Filtering for a compare-at price leaves 9 products, all in the $12 to $30 band, with discounts of 20 to 40%. The three products with the most variants are the same three that carry a compare-at price.

You conclude that the store competes on price in its cheaper range, keeps its higher-priced items at list price, and pushes three products hard. Before you copy any of that, put your own costs against the $24 item that most resembles yours. Use the margin guide to find out whether you would still keep money at that price. A price match is a margin decision.

Reading the variant structure

How a store names and prices variants says a lot about how it sells.

• Pack sizes as variants (1 pack, 2 pack, 3 pack) suggest a quantity-based offer. Compare the price per unit across the packs to see how steep the discount is.
• Many colours at one price suggests the product is a platform for choice, and photography is doing the work.
• Size variants with different prices suggest real cost differences in the product.
• A variant that looks like a bundle (for example "Set of 3 with case") is worth opening on the live page. It is often the product the ads push.
• Odd SKUs. Prefixes can show the supplier or the collection a product came from. They tell you how the catalog is organised.

Use the notes to build your own plan, not to mirror theirs. The goal is to learn what price points and pack sizes shoppers are being asked to accept in your category.

Other uses

• Plan your own range. Look at where a competitor sees demand and what they skip.
• Bundle planning. Find which two variants a store pairs, and the price that makes the pair obvious.
• Client kickoff. If you do store work for clients, export their catalog so the conversation is about real SKUs.
• Research a niche. Export a few stores in one category and compare their price ranges. To find what to sell in the first place, start with the winning products guide.

Tracking a catalog over time

One export is a snapshot. Prices, stock and the product list change, so a second export a month later tells you more than the first. Save each file with the date in its name, then compare handles and prices side by side. New handles are launches. Handles that disappeared were dropped or hidden. A price that moved, or a compare-at price that appeared, may be a promotion or a repositioning. Looking at the same store every few weeks takes a few minutes, and shows you what the store is testing without guessing.

Common mistakes

• Copying photos and descriptions. The export is for research. Images and text belong to the store that made them.
• Importing the file into your own store. Shopify's product import expects its own column layout, so the file would need mapping, and you should not publish another store's catalog.
• Reading compare-at prices as real discounts. A struck-through price is a merchant's choice. Check how long it has been there.
• Treating the catalog as the whole business. You see what is public. You do not see sales, costs or hidden products.

What to check next

Pair the catalog with what the store runs: the ads (competitor ads guide), the apps (app detector guide) and the theme (theme finder guide). Together they describe the public side of a competitor's store.

Shopify questions