Import wishlists

Plan: every plan, including Free. Keeping named lists from the file needs Pro.

The importer adds saved items from another wishlist app, or from any spreadsheet, to your customers’ Cove wishlists. Open it from Settings › Account › Import wishlists › Import, or from the optional “Import wishlists from Swym” step of the setup guide on Home.

Nothing is saved to anyone’s wishlist until you confirm.

Step by step

1. Upload

Choose or drop a .csv or .txt file on the upload box (up to 50 MB, at most 1,000,000 rows), then click Check file. Cove reads the header row to tell which kind of file it is: a Swym Shoppers report, a Swym import file or a generic CSV. The columns each one needs are on File formats.

Only one import runs at a time.

2. Preview (a dry run)

Cove matches every row while the page shows Checking your file. Large files take a few minutes, and you can leave the page meanwhile. You can Cancel at this point.

• Customers are matched by email to customers in your Shopify store. The email must belong to an existing customer record; Cove never creates customers.
• Products are matched by product ID, then variant ID, then SKU, then handle (from a handle column or a /products/… link). A SKU shared by variants of different products isn’t used to match.

The Preview then shows:

Row	Meaning
Customers matched	Customers found in your store, out of the emails in the file.
Products matched	Products found in your store.
Items to import	New saves the import will add.
Already in wishlists	Items your customers have already saved; they are left alone.

and a Skipped because table counting every row that won’t be imported, by reason.

3. Confirm

Click Import N items to go ahead, or Cancel to stop. The import runs in the background (you can leave the page); when it’s done, Last import shows how many items were imported for how many customers.

4. The skip report

Download skipped rows (on the preview and after the import) gives a CSV with, for each skipped row, the line number in your file, the reason and the product reference (product ID, variant ID, SKU, handle). It has no email addresses: match the line numbers back to your own file. It lists up to 100,000 rows.

Reason	What to do
No email (guest or blank row)	Nothing: lists without an email can’t be tied to a customer.
No customer with that email in your store	Create or import the customer in Shopify, then import again.
No product ID, variant ID, SKU or product URL	Add a product column to those rows.
Product no longer in your store	Nothing, unless the product was recreated with a new ID.
Same item listed twice in the file	Nothing: the first one is imported.
Already in the customer’s wishlist	Nothing.
List already has 500 items	A list holds at most 500 items.

What gets imported

• Saved dates come across when the file has a date column; otherwise the item is dated at the import.
• Named lists are kept on Pro. With the multiple lists feature, a list name in the file becomes a named list for that customer (up to 20 named lists per customer; more go to their default list). Swym’s default names (“My wishlist”, “Wishlist”, “Favorites”, “Default” and similar) go into the customer’s default list. On other plans every item goes into each customer’s one wishlist, and the preview says so.
• Importing the same file again adds nothing twice. Rows already imported show as “Already in wishlists”, so you can safely re-upload a file, upload overlapping exports, or finish an import that was cut short.

What an import doesn’t do

• It doesn’t use wishlist actions from your monthly quota, however many items it adds.
• It doesn’t send alerts: no Shopify Flow “item added” trigger fires for imported items, so customers aren’t messaged all at once. On Starter and up, the imported products are watched for price and stock changes from then on, so later back-in-stock and price-drop alerts work for them.
• It doesn’t count in Analytics as saves.
• It can’t move guest lists. A guest’s list lives in one browser and has no email attached, so no app can move it.

Your file and customer data

Reading customer emails is protected customer data in Shopify. If Shopify hasn’t yet approved Cove’s access to customer emails on your store, the import stops with a message saying so; try again once access is approved.

• Emails are used only in memory to find each customer. They are never written to Cove’s database, a report or a log.
• The uploaded file is stored encrypted and deleted as soon as the preview is ready; the matched plan (Shopify IDs only, also encrypted) is deleted when the import ends.
• Everything is deleted 24 hours after upload at the latest, imported or not. An import left unconfirmed for 24 hours expires and needs a new upload.
• An import that stops reporting progress for 15 minutes (for example after an app restart) is marked as interrupted. Upload the file again to finish; rows already imported aren’t duplicated.

Moving from Swym Wishlist Plus

Cove’s importer is built around Swym’s exports. In short:

1. Install Cove now and import later if you need to. Uploading the same file twice never creates duplicates.
2. Don’t uninstall Swym until you have your export.
3. Export from Swym. The best file is Swym’s Shoppers report (older Swym admin: Insights › Metrics › detailed report under Shoppers › export; newer admin: Reports › Wishlist Activity Report › Export, 60 days at a time, so export in 60-day chunks and upload each one). Swym’s own import format also works.
4. Import into Cove as above: upload, check the preview, confirm, and download the skipped rows if any.
5. Remove Swym’s app embeds and blocks in the theme editor (App embeds, and any Swym blocks on product, collection and cart templates), then turn on Cove’s app embed and add its product button.

Swym Wishlist Plus is currently paused for all merchants, so its admin and exports may not be reachable; upload the file whenever you have it. The full guide, with Swym’s own sources and the theme checks Swym recommends, is at Moving from Swym Wishlist Plus.

Not carried over from any app: guest lists, settings, alert history, segments, analytics and button styling. Set up the look in the Design Studio.