Practical guidance
Add or remove a UTF-8 BOM before import
A UTF-8 byte-order mark is the invisible character U+FEFF at the start of a file. Excel often uses it to recognize Unicode. An importer that treats it as part of the first header will look for a column named Title and fail to find one.
Check the first header, not the product text
If every accented name looks right but the first column is rejected, inspect the start of the file. A marker before Title is metadata. It is not a space you can see in every editor, and deleting the letters T-i-t-l-e will not remove it.
- Keep an untouched copy.
- Select UTF-8 in Golanto and confirm the first header reads as the expected name, without a replacement character.
- For Excel on Windows, download the Excel comma or Excel semicolon format. Those presets add the marker and use CRLF.
- For Shopify, compare the first header with the documented column name after download. Remove the marker if the importer treats it as part of the name.
Do not use the marker to repair damaged text
A byte-order mark tells a program how to read the bytes that follow. It cannot restore names that were already saved with the wrong encoding. If you see sequences such as é where you expected é, go back to the original export and choose the encoding that produced the file.
Worked example
The same header with and without a leading marker
Title,SKU
Café cup,00021Title,SKU
Café cup,00021The visible header is still Title. The marker is only at the start of the file.
What this check cannot establish
Golanto can keep, add, or omit a UTF-8 marker on download. It does not claim that every marketplace ignores the marker, and it cannot recover text that was already replaced with question marks or mojibake.
Check your file
Start with a copy. Review changes before downloading your import file.
Open the CSV tool