Shopify CSV Boolean Values: TRUE/FALSE Format Errors & How to Fix Them

Your CSV looks perfect in Excel. But Shopify rejects it with "invalid boolean value" — and you have no idea which column, which row, or what's wrong. The culprit is almost always a boolean field that says something other than exactly TRUE or FALSE.

Which Columns Are Boolean?

Shopify treats these columns as boolean fields — they accept exactly two values:

Column	What it controls
Published	Whether the product is visible in your store
Variant Requires Shipping	Whether this variant needs physical delivery
Variant Taxable	Whether taxes apply to this variant
Gift Card	Whether the product is a gift card

What Breaks: Values That Fail

Shopify accepts only uppercase TRUE and FALSE. Here's what commonly appears in real CSVs and what happens:

Your value	Result
true, false (lowercase)	❌ Import error
yes, no	❌ Import error
1, 0	❌ Import error
Y, N	❌ Import error
TRUE, FALSE	✅ Works

The lowercase true is the sneakiest one — it looks right at a glance, and it's the default output of many other platforms' exports.

The One Special Case: Blank Is Not FALSE

Here's a gotcha that trips up experienced users: leaving a boolean cell blank doesn't mean FALSE — it means "use Shopify's default." For Published, the default is TRUE. So if you blank out Published hoping to hide a product, it will be published instead.

If you want a product hidden, write FALSE explicitly. Never rely on blanks for boolean logic.

Why Excel Makes It Worse

Excel "helpfully" reformats values. If you type TRUE, Excel may convert the cell to its internal boolean type — which exports as TRUE sometimes, but 1 or true other times depending on your Excel version and locale settings. This inconsistency is exactly why a CSV that imports fine today fails tomorrow after someone opens and re-saves it in Excel.

How to Fix Boolean Values

For a small file: Find & Replace each bad value (yes → TRUE, no → FALSE, etc.) — but be careful: a global replace of 1 would corrupt your price and inventory columns.

For anything bigger: use CSVPreflight. It checks boolean columns only, flags every bad value with its exact row number, and auto-fixes yes/no/1/0/Y/N/true/false to proper TRUE/FALSE — without touching your other columns.