Shopify Order Line Item Export: Get Product-Level Data for Every Sale
An order line items export gives you a spreadsheet where every product in an order is listed separately, with its own SKU, quantity, price and fulfillment details. Instead of one row per order, you get one row per item, which makes it much easier to see what you actually sold.
Shopify’s built-in order export already includes line items, while WooCommerce stores usually rely on an export plugin or reporting tool. Knowing how each tool lays out the data helps you get a file that’s ready for sales analysis, fulfillment or accounting without hours of cleanup.
How to Export Order Line Items in Shopify
Shopify includes line item details in its standard order export, so you don’t need an app for the basic columns. Follow these steps in your Shopify admin:
- Go to Orders and sort or filter the list to the orders you need.
- Click Export.
- Choose which orders to export, such as the current page, all orders or Orders by date with a start and end date.
- Under Export as, choose a CSV format.
- Click Export orders, not Export transaction histories, which only includes payment data.
Small exports of up to 50 orders, or the current page, download straight to your device. Larger exports and exports by date are emailed to you and the store owner, and very large files can take a while, with Shopify estimating about four hours for around 400,000 items.
Line item columns in the Shopify export
The orders CSV contains order, customer, address and payment columns alongside a set of line item columns. These are the ones that describe each product:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Lineitem quantity | How many units of the product or variant were ordered |
| Lineitem name | The item’s name |
| Lineitem price | The item’s price |
| Lineitem compare-at price | The item’s compare-at price when the order was placed |
| Lineitem SKU | The item’s SKU |
| Lineitem requires shipping | Whether the item needs shipping |
| Lineitem taxable | Whether the item was taxable |
| Lineitem fulfillment status | Whether the item has been fulfilled |
| Lineitem discount | The discount on the item, not including order-level product discounts |
| Vendor | The product’s vendor |
The file also includes up to five line tax columns, shown as tax name and value pairs. Every value reflects the order at the time it was placed, not your current product data.
Fill in blank order fields
When an order has several items, each extra item appears on its own row with many order fields left blank. This shows that the rows belong to the same order, but it makes filtering or pivoting by customer, date or status harder.
Use the Name column, which holds the order number, to group rows from the same order. If you need every row to carry the order details, fill the blank cells down from the first row of each order in your spreadsheet before you analyze the data.
Export line item properties
Line item properties are the custom details attached to an item, such as engraving text or a gift message. Shopify’s order export doesn’t list a column for them, so you need an export app if you rely on that information.
In Matrixify, for example, you create a new export, choose Orders with the line items columns, apply any filters and run the export. The file includes a Line: Properties column, with each property on its own line within the cell.
How to Export Order Line Items in WooCommerce
In WooCommerce, line item exports usually come from an order export plugin or a reporting tool. Each one has its own setting for how line items appear in the file.
With WebToffee’s Order, Coupon, Subscription Export Import plugin, line items are exported in a single column by default. To change the layout, follow the plugin’s export steps and, in the advanced options, set Exclude Line items to No, then choose Separate columns or Separate rows under Export line items in.
In Metorik, turn on the one row per line item setting when exporting orders or subscriptions. You can then choose which columns appear for each item, so an order with three different products produces three rows.
Choose the Right Line Item Layout
Export tools arrange line items in a few different ways, and the right one depends on what you’ll do with the file. This comparison shows when each layout works best:
| Layout | How it looks | Best for | Drawback |
|---|---|---|---|
| One row per line item | Each product gets its own row, with order details repeated or left blank | Product sales analysis, pivot tables and picking lists | Order totals repeat or go blank across rows |
| Separate columns | One row per order, with numbered column sets for each item | Reviewing orders side by side | Gets very wide when orders have many items |
| Single column | All items for an order combined into one cell | Quick order overviews | Hard to filter, sum or sort by product |
| Order rows plus item rows | An order row followed by a row for each line item, labeled by type | Imports into other systems that expect this structure | Needs filtering before analysis |
One row per line item is usually the easiest layout to work with, because spreadsheets and reporting tools handle it naturally. Some tools also offer an option to copy order data into every item row, which saves the fill-down step.
What You Can Do With an Order Line Items Export
Line item data answers questions an order-level export can’t. Common uses include:
- Product sales analysis. Total units and revenue by SKU, product or vendor for any date range.
- Fulfillment and picking. Build picking lists or check which items are still unfulfilled.
- Vendor and supplier reports. Share sales by vendor with suppliers or dropshipping partners.
- Accounting and tax review. Check taxable items, line discounts and line taxes against your books.
- Bulk editing in other systems. Some inventory tools let you export line items from a draft purchase order, edit them in a spreadsheet and import them back.
When you re-import edited line items into another system, check its matching rules first. In some tools, a row with the same SKU replaces an existing line rather than adding a new one, so export and review the current lines before you upload.
Common Order Line Item Export Problems
Many issues come from how line items share order-level data. Watch for these when working with your file:
- Double-counted totals. Summing an order-level column such as Total across every row counts orders more than once, so sum line item values instead or count each order once.
- Blank order fields. Extra item rows leave order details empty, which breaks filters until you fill them in.
- Missing discounts. In Shopify, the Discount Code column doesn’t include automatic discounts, and Lineitem discount excludes order-level product discounts.
- Blank compare-at prices. The compare-at column can be empty if no compare-at price applied when the order was placed, or if market pricing or a checkout app overrode it.
- Missing custom details. Line item properties need an export app if your platform’s export doesn’t include them.
- Empty files. If a plugin exports only headers, update it to the latest version and try again.
- Garbled characters. Open the CSV as UTF-8 so special characters in product names display correctly.
Conclusion
An order line items export turns your order history into product-level data you can sort, total and share. Choosing the right layout and preparing the file properly makes it far easier to understand what sells, fulfill orders and keep your records accurate. We hope this guide helps you set up your order line items export with confidence.
