Guide · Export

Export

Every export is written so that it can be edited in a spreadsheet and imported straight back. The column names are exactly the ones the importer reads, which is the whole point: an export is the easiest way to get a correct file to start from.

Pick an entity, then a scope

Choose the type from the grid — or the New export menu — and the dialog asks for a scope. "All" means the whole set; the others narrow it before anything is read, so a filtered export is genuinely smaller rather than trimmed afterwards.

CSV or Excel

In the spreadsheet every value is text, deliberately. A SKU like 0012345 stays as it is instead of becoming 12345 — which is what Excel does the moment it decides a cell is a number, and would make a re-import address a different product.

It runs in the background

• Starting an export queues it. The row appears immediately as Pending, becomes Processing…, then Completed or Failed.
• You can leave the page. The file is built server-side; come back later and download it from Export history.
• One export per entity at a time. While one is running, that entity's tile is dimmed and marked running.
• A completed export with zero rows has no file to download — the action column says so instead of offering a dead button. That normally means the scope matched nothing.
• A failed export shows View error with the upstream message. Nothing partial is left behind; start it again.

Files open correctly in Excel

Every file is written with a UTF-8 byte-order mark, so Excel shows accented and non-Latin text properly instead of mangling it. The importer strips that mark again on the way back in, so a round trip is clean.

Files are streamed to disk as they are built rather than assembled in memory, so a large catalog does not depend on how much memory the server has.

Warnings on a completed export

An export can succeed and still have something worth telling you. When it does, the row carries a warning icon:

• Products with no SKU. They export fine, but a file that identifies rows by SKU cannot re-import them — they are matched by name, UPC, MPN or variant id instead.
• Custom fields sharing a name. BigCommerce allows two; a spreadsheet column cannot hold both.
• A metafield read that failed. The rest of the export is intact; only those columns are missing.
• A filtered category export whose parents were not selected. Those rows only re-import into a store that already has the parent categories.
• A page whose type cannot be written back. The Blog Index page is reported by BigCommerce with a type the write side refuses, so its Type cell is left blank deliberately — otherwise re-importing would fail that row every time.
• A customer group with more than one discount rule. A row expresses one, so the export says which groups have more rather than silently losing the rest.
• A store with more than one category tree. Categories do not report which tree they belong to, so the export cannot record it — and says so rather than leaving you to guess.

What a products export brings with it

A product export is not just the product row. It carries variants, images, custom fields, metafields, quantity breaks, modifiers, options and videos, spread across the same continuation-row shape the importer reads:

• one row per product, then one row per real variant;
• lists — extra images, quantity breaks, modifier values — ride on continuation rows that repeat the Product ID and SKU;
• custom fields and metafields become their own columns named after the data, so the header depends on what your catalog actually uses. Each metafield gets two columns, its value and its visibility (Metafield Permission: forix.colour), so an export carries everything needed to recreate the field exactly on another store. Without the visibility column, moving a store would publish every admin-only field to the storefront, because on the new store each metafield is created fresh and a create with no permission takes the default.

BigCommerce's synthetic base variant — the one products without options carry — is skipped, because it is not a variant anyone edits.