ShadowOrders.spaceManaged data & evidence services
CATALOG HORROR LIBRARY

Twelve boring ways ecommerce migrations go wrong.

No drama, no fabricated client stories—just recurring data failure patterns worth catching before production.

Excel ate the SKU

Long numeric identifiers or leading-zero SKUs are silently reformatted before the file ever reaches the migration script.

One SKU, two products

The same identifier appears under multiple parent products, making stock and variant ownership ambiguous.

Zero means two things

A supplier uses 0 for both out-of-stock and “inventory not provided,” creating false certainty.

Variant shape changes mid-file

Some products use Size/Color while others reverse or rename options, breaking mechanical grouping.

The delimiter changes

A “CSV” contains commas, semicolons or embedded line breaks inconsistently across rows.

Images return 403

The catalog looks fine until remote image hosts block automated retrieval or expire signed URLs.

Invisible duplicates

Whitespace, Unicode or capitalization makes values look unique to humans but collide after normalization.

Price without currency

A clean-looking number becomes dangerous when supplier, market and target shop use different currencies.

Parent rows are missing

Variant rows arrive without enough information to reconstruct the product they belong to.

Tags became a database

Business-critical attributes were packed into free-form tags with no stable schema.

Supplier changed headers

A weekly export renames one column and silently shifts a previously working mapping.

Unknown became empty

Missing source meaning is converted to blank output instead of being surfaced as a question.

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