Shopify product handle invalid characters
The handle becomes the product's URL slug. Shopify only accepts lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens — no spaces, underscores, accented characters or punctuation. If your CSV's handle column has any of those, Shopify silently rewrites it on import, which means the URL you planned isn't the URL you get, and any external links or redirects built against the CSV value will 404.
Example
Rejected: Men's Running Shoes (Blue)
Fixed: mens-running-shoes-blue
How to fix it
- Lowercase the whole value.
- Replace spaces and underscores with a single hyphen.
- Strip apostrophes, parentheses, and accented characters (transliterate, don't just delete — "café" should become "cafe", not "caf").
- Collapse repeated hyphens and trim leading/trailing ones.
Upload your file to Supplier Data Ops to catch this and every other row-level error automatically before you import.