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Practical guidance

Preserve leading zeros in SKUs and barcodes

000078 is an identifier, not the number 78. A repair workflow should preserve its characters from upload through export.

Documentation checked · English

Find the first place the value changed

Inspect the original CSV in a text editor. If it still contains 000078, the data may be intact and only the spreadsheet view is converting it. If the file already contains 78, return to a trusted export. The intended width cannot safely be inferred from nearby rows.

  1. Keep identifiers as text when importing into a spreadsheet.
  2. Inspect long identifiers for scientific notation or changed trailing digits.
  3. Save a copy and compare several identifiers in the raw file.
  4. Validate the copied file before uploading it to a marketplace.

Formatting does not recover lost data

Displaying six digits can make 78 look like 000078, but it does not prove those zeros existed in the source. Likewise, adding zeros until every SKU has the same length can create a different SKU. Recover from the source catalog or confirm each affected value.

Worked example

An identifier stays a literal string

Before
SKU,Title
000078,Oak tray
009104,Glass carafe
After review
SKU,Title
000078,Oak tray
009104,Glass carafe

An unchanged before/after is the correct outcome. Quoting a CSV value alone does not control every spreadsheet’s type inference.

What this check cannot establish

Golanto cannot recover zeros or digits already lost before upload. Machine-import exports retain the original identifier and do not add spreadsheet formulas to force display formatting.

Check your file

Start with a copy. Review changes before downloading your import file.

Open the CSV tool

Official references

Schema review: golanto-csv-1. Examples are synthetic. Store-specific and unpublished requirements are outside these checks.