I'm importing 200 products to Shopify with a CSV; how do I generate English handles for all of them at once?

A small column as an example

Four lines copied from the title column, with one blank row for a product you have not named yet:

Arabic Coffee 500g Saudi Dates Box (1 kg) Cardamom & Saffron Mix

In Latin mode with batch mode on, the result is:

arabic-coffee-500g saudi-dates-box-1-kg cardamom-and-saffron-mix

Three things to notice. The brackets vanished and 1 kg became two parts with a hyphen. The ampersand became 'and', because that option is on by default in Latin mode. And the blank line stayed blank in its place. Under the result you see 'Lines: 4 · empty slugs: 1', so you know at once that a row is missing its title.

Why keeping the order matters

Because you are pasting the result into a column beside the titles. If the blank line were dropped, every handle after it would shift up one row, the dates would get the cardamom handle, and you would only notice after the import. The tool keeps the line count exactly as it was for that reason.

The trap: two titles, one handle

The same title always gives the same slug, and punctuation makes no difference. Add a fifth line, Arabic Coffee, 500g! and you get arabic-coffee-500g a second time, identical to the first line. The tool does not compare lines with each other or add a number to tell them apart. What the platform does when an import file contains two identical handles is the platform's business, so check its import help rather than relying on an assumption.

The safer route is to catch duplicates before uploading: paste the handle column into your sheet and use duplicate highlighting or a sort, then make similar products different in their titles by size, colour or flavour.

The steps

1. In your product file, copy the whole English title column, without the header row.
2. Open the URL slug generator, choose 'Latin ASCII', and turn on 'Batch mode: one title per line'.
3. Paste the column, and check the line and empty-slug counts under the result.
4. If the list is above about 4,000 lines, press 'Generate' yourself, since automatic processing stops at that size.
5. Copy the full result and paste it into the handle column, starting on the same row where the titles start.
6. Check for duplicates in the sheet, then compare the file's columns with the import template the platform provides before uploading.

If you want to see the CSV as rows and fields to confirm the handle column sits in the right place, open it in the CSV and JSON converter before uploading.