A step-by-step guide to adding books to Shopify using ISBN lookup. Enter an ISBN, fetch metadata automatically, and create draft products in seconds.
TL;DR: Adding books to Shopify doesn’t require retyping every title, author, and description by hand. With the Book Importer for Shopify app, you scan an ISBN, review the auto-fetched metadata, and hit create. This guide walks you through each step: from finding your ISBN to having a complete, draft-ready product in your Shopify admin.
Maybe you just signed up for Shopify. Maybe you’ve been running a physical bookstore for years and finally decided to sell online. Maybe you’re standing behind the counter right now, looking at a shelf of new arrivals that need to go into inventory.
Either way, the problem is the same: dozens (or hundreds) of books that need product listings, and Shopify’s product editor expects you to fill in everything from scratch. (New to selling books on Shopify entirely? Start with our complete guide for first-time merchants.)
Here’s what most merchants don’t realize: every published book already carries a unique identifier that unlocks its full metadata. That identifier is the ISBN. And with the right tool, it turns a 10-minute-per-book chore into a 30-second workflow.
Every commercially published book printed after 1970 has an ISBN. You’ll find it in one of three places:
Older books may only show a 10-digit ISBN. That’s fine. The app converts ISBN-10 to ISBN-13 automatically during validation.
The Book Importer app lives inside your Shopify admin as an embedded app. Navigate to Apps, open Book Importer, and you’ll land on the import screen. One text field. One button. No complicated setup required.
Type or paste the ISBN into the input field. The app validates the number instantly: it checks the format, verifies the checksum digit, and normalizes it to ISBN-13. If you accidentally include spaces or hyphens, the app strips them out.
Click “Look up.” Within seconds, the app queries multiple book databases and returns everything it can find: title, author, description, publisher, publication date, page count, cover image, and more. No copy-pasting from Amazon. No Google image searching for cover art.
Before anything touches your Shopify catalog, you see a full preview of the fetched data. This is your chance to verify and adjust. The preview shows:
Every field is editable. Want to shorten the description? Change the title capitalization? Add your own notes? Do it right here, before the product is created.
The app may fetch a suggested list price from the book’s metadata when available. You can accept it, override it, or leave the price at zero. Since products are created as drafts, you can always update pricing later in your Shopify admin before publishing.
Click “Create draft product.” The app maps every piece of metadata to the right Shopify field:
The product appears in your Shopify admin as a draft. Review it, make final tweaks if needed, then set it to active when you’re ready to sell.
Every import is logged. The import history page shows all your past lookups with their status: successful, failed, or skipped as duplicate. You can click through to view the Shopify product or re-check the metadata that was used. This log is especially useful when you’re importing many books over multiple sessions.
The app checks for duplicates before creating anything. It searches your existing products by ISBN-13 barcode and SKU. If it finds a match, it won’t create a second listing. Instead, you get a clear message with a direct link to the existing product. No accidental duplicates cluttering your catalog.
This is a major advantage over CSV imports, where duplicate detection is entirely on you.
Not every book has perfect data in every database. Some older or niche titles might be missing a description or cover image. When that happens, the app still creates the product with whatever data it found. You’ll see which fields came back empty so you can fill them in manually.
The app pulls from multiple sources, so even when one database has gaps, another often fills them. The result is usually far more complete than what most merchants manage by hand.
Either works. If your book only shows an ISBN-10 (common for books published before 2007), enter it as-is. The app converts it to ISBN-13 internally, since ISBN-13 is the standard used by Shopify’s barcode field and virtually all modern retail systems.
Both versions are stored in the product metafields, so your records stay complete regardless of which format you started with.
If you run a physical bookstore, you don’t need to switch to a laptop every time new stock arrives. The Book Importer includes a dedicated Book Scanner tile for Shopify POS. Tap it on your POS device and you’re ready to scan.
The POS scanner supports three input methods:
The workflow mirrors the admin experience. Scan the ISBN, preview the metadata (cover, title, author, publisher), and tap “Import Book” to create the product right from behind the counter. Duplicate detection works here too: if the book is already in your catalog, you’ll see a clear message instead of a duplicate listing.
For bookstores processing new shipments or buying second-hand stock at the register, this is the fastest path from physical book to Shopify product. No laptop required. No context switching. Just scan and import.
That’s the entire workflow. Find the ISBN, enter it, review metadata, create the product. What used to take 10 minutes of copying and pasting from multiple sources now takes 30 seconds of actual work.
If you’re tired of manually typing out book details, the ISBN-based approach eliminates the grunt work so you can focus on what actually matters: pricing, merchandising, and selling.
Ready to try it? The Book Importer for Shopify handles the entire process from inside your Shopify admin.
