Migrating Your Book Inventory to Shopify: ISBN-Based vs Manual Entry

TL;DR: Moving your book catalog to Shopify? Skip the manual entry nightmare. An ISBN-based book importer pulls complete metadata from book databases, giving you professional listings without retyping a single title.

The Spreadsheet With 500 ISBNs

You’ve got a spreadsheet. Maybe it’s from your old WooCommerce store, your POS system, or a distributor’s catalog. Columns for ISBN, title, maybe price. You need all of those books in Shopify.

The obvious approach: Shopify’s built-in CSV import. Export from old system, massage the columns, import. Sounds clean. In practice, it’s a mess.

Why CSV Migration Falls Short for Books

Shopify’s CSV import works great for t-shirts and candles. You know the title, you wrote the description, you shot the photos. But books are different. The metadata already exists somewhere else, and your spreadsheet probably doesn’t have all of it.

Common problems with CSV-based book migration:

• Missing descriptions: Your old system had ISBNs and titles, but no product descriptions. Now every listing says nothing about the book.
• No cover images: You’d need to find, download, and match hundreds of cover images manually. Most merchants skip this step entirely.
• Incomplete vendor data: Publisher names are often missing or inconsistent (“Penguin” vs “Penguin Random House” vs “PRH”).
• No barcodes: The ISBN is there as text, but it’s not mapped to Shopify’s barcode field. Your inventory scanner won’t work.

You end up with 500 products that technically exist but look unprofessional. No images, thin descriptions, no barcodes. That’s not a store. That’s a list. (We cover exactly why book listings end up missing covers and descriptions in detail.)

Manual Entry: Thorough but Brutal

The alternative is doing it right, one product at a time. Search for the book online, copy the description, download the cover, fill in every field. You’ll get beautiful listings. You’ll also spend 5-10 minutes per book.

For 500 books, that’s 40-80 hours of work. A full work week or two of nothing but data entry. Most merchants give up somewhere around book 50 and leave the rest as bare-bones listings. There’s a faster way to add books to Shopify.

ISBN-Based Import: The Middle Ground That’s Actually Better

There’s a third option. You already have the ISBNs. Each one is a key that unlocks the book’s full metadata from professional book databases. Title, authors, description, cover image, publisher, page count. All attached to that 13-digit number.

With an ISBN-based import tool, the process looks different:

1. Enter the ISBN
2. Review the auto-populated product data
3. Make any edits you want
4. Create the draft product in Shopify

Each book takes about 30 seconds. The cover image is included. The description is pulled from the publisher’s record. The ISBN is stored as both SKU and barcode. No retyping, no image hunting, no guessing.

Side-by-Side: Three Migration Approaches

The numbers speak for themselves. ISBN-based import gives you the quality of manual entry at the speed of a bulk operation.

What About Books Not in the Database?

Some books won’t return results. Very old editions, self-published titles without proper ISBN registration, or regional publications with limited database coverage. It happens.

When it does, the app tells you clearly. You can add those few books manually and move on. For most catalogs, 90%+ of titles will import cleanly. That’s still hundreds of hours saved.

Make the Move

If you’re migrating a book catalog to Shopify, don’t settle for incomplete CSV imports or weeks of manual entry. Your ISBNs are the shortcut. Book Importer for Shopify turns them into complete, professional product listings.

Bring your spreadsheet. Keep your sanity.