CSV import error
How to fix "file must be UTF-8 encoded"
What this error means and the exact, free way to fix it — right in your browser, with nothing uploaded.
If your import fails with:
What it means
Store importers require UTF-8 text. If the file was saved in another encoding (Windows-1252 or Latin-1, common when Excel on Windows saves a plain CSV), accented letters, curly quotes, em-dashes and emoji become "illegal characters" the importer rejects — or show up as garbled text like é or ’.
Common causes
- Saved from Excel as "CSV" instead of "CSV UTF-8".
- A byte-order-mark (BOM) that Excel adds to the front of the file.
- Pasted text with curly quotes or special characters inside a non-UTF-8 file.
How to fix it
The deterministic part — the BOM and the encoding declaration — is a one-click fix.
- Open the file in the free Fix a CSV tool.
- It strips the BOM and re-saves the file as clean UTF-8 so the importer accepts it.
- Re-import the cleaned file.
Honest caveat: if the characters are already visibly garbled in the file (é, ’), the bytes were mis-converted before you got the file — re-saving can't un-garble them. The cleanest fix is to re-export from the source platform and choose UTF-8.
Re-save as UTF-8 free, in your browser
Fix a CSV strips the BOM and outputs clean UTF-8 — the encoding importers require.
Also free, in your browser: all CSV tools · the converter · Fix a CSV · Split CSV