Occasionally, when importing a CSV file that contains non-English or special characters, QuickBooks Commerce is unable to understand and process the file due to the way it’s encoded by your spreadsheet application.

In such instances, QuickBooks Commerce will present the error 'invalid byte sequence in UTF-8'.

Encoding your CSV files in the UTF-8 format will ensure that QuickBooks Commerce is able to correctly read the contents of your CSV files.

We’ll guide you through selecting the UTF-8 format for the most commonly used applications:

Microsoft Excel 2016

Windows

1. Open your CSV file Excel document.
2. Click File in the upper left corner.
3. Select Save As towards the left-hand side.
4. Directly below the name of your file, there’s a file type dropdown menu. From here select CSV UTF-8 (Comma Delimited) (*.CSV).
5. Save your file, then upload it into QuickBooks Commerce as normal.
   
   

Mac

1. Open your CSV file Excel document.
2. Click File in the Menu Bar.
3. Select Save As towards the left-hand side.
4. Directly below the name of your file, there’s a file type dropdown menu. From here select CSV UTF-8 (Comma Deliminated) (*.CSV).
5. Save your file.
   

   

Google Sheets

1. Open your CSV file in Google Sheets.
2. Click File in the upper left corner.
3. Select Download As in the File menu.
4. Select Comma-separated values (.csv, current sheet)
5. Save your file, then upload it into QuickBooks Commerce as normal.
   
   
   

Once your CSV file has been saved using UTF-8 encoding it's ready to be uploaded into QuickBooks Commerce. 

An alternative method using Notepad ++

If you are familiar with Notepad++ you can also try this workaround.

1. Create the file as Excel workbook - .xlsx. 
2. Make sure that the first entry in Excel contains a special character. 
3. Save the file as Unicode Text. 
4. Open Notepad ++ (this can be downloaded for free here).
5. Open the file in Notepad ++ 
6. Replace the tabs with commas. 
7. Click on Encoding and change the Encoding to UTF-8. 
8. Save the file as type All Types and add .csv to the end of the name. 
9. Do not open the file in Excel as you will lose the encoding.