Shopify Orders Page: See Ordered Items and Properties in One Sheet

If you have searched for a way to make the Shopify orders page show ordered items, you have probably found the Shopify Community threads asking the same thing, often without a clear answer. The Orders list in Shopify admin is built for managing orders: you see the order number, date, customer, total, payment and fulfillment status. What you don’t see, side by side, is the custom detail on each item, such as the engraving text, the gift message or the link to a file the customer uploaded. To read those, you open each order.

That is fine for five orders. It breaks down when a workshop, print shop or packing team has to work through fifty. The practical fix is to stop looking for this view in the Orders list and build one sheet instead, where each row is an ordered item and each custom detail has its own column.

This guide explains where those details are stored, how to plan the sheet, and what to check before it goes to production.

Where the item details are stored

When a customer fills in a field on a product page, such as “Name to engrave”, the theme or a product options app saves the answer on that line item as a name and a value. These are line-item properties. In a theme they come from form inputs named properties[Engraving], properties[Gift message] and so on, as Shopify’s theme docs describe.

A few things about properties shape the sheet you need:

• They belong to one item, not to the order. An order with two engraved pens carries two engraving texts, and each has to stay with its own pen.
• Different products use different properties. A ring might have Engraving and Size; a card has Gift message; a print has Upload.
• Names that start with an underscore are hidden at checkout. The Liquid line_item reference notes this. Apps often use such names for their own data, and most production sheets leave them out.

Shopify’s own order export from the Orders page gives you line-item columns such as name, quantity and SKU, plus the order notes and note attributes. It has no columns for line-item properties, which is why so many personalised shops end up copying text from each order by hand.

Step 1: Decide what a row should be

Before exporting anything, decide what your workshop or fulfilment partner needs on each row. For personalised products that is usually one row per line item, not one row per order. An order with two engraved pens should give two rows, each with its own engraving text, and the order number repeats on both. We compare the two layouts in one row per line item vs one row per order.

Step 2: List the columns your team uses

Write down the columns your team works from today, for example:

1. Order number
2. Product and variant
3. SKU
4. Quantity
5. Engraving text
6. Font or style
7. Upload link
8. Gift message

Different teams need different files. A workshop needs the item and the custom text; a bookkeeper needs dates and totals. Keep customer emails and prices out of a sheet that goes to an outside printer.

Step 3: Use the same property names on every product

Each different name becomes a different column. Engraving, engraving text and Text to engrave end up in three columns, and the sheet gets hard to sort. Pick one name per field and use it on every product that offers that option. If you use a product options app, check the name it saves on the order, not only the label customers see.

Step 4: Filter the batch, then export

Export only the orders you are about to make or ship, for example paid, unfulfilled orders from the last few days that carry a production tag. A tag is a simple way to mark a batch; our guide to bulk fulfilling and tagging orders covers tagging many orders at once.

Step 5: Check the sheet before production starts

A few quick checks save remakes:

• Compare a sample. Pick two or three orders and compare the engraving text in the sheet with the order page.
• Look for empty property columns. A column that is blank on most rows often means some products use a slightly different property name. Fix the name on the product (Step 3).
• Look for very long text that won’t fit the engraving area or the card.
• Open the upload links and save the artwork in your job folder, named by order number.
• Leave out cancelled or refunded orders. Filter by status so they don’t reach the workshop.

Common mistakes

• Squeezing several items into one row. A one-row-per-order layout puts every item’s text in the same cell. Use one row per line item for production.
• All properties in one cell. A cell such as Engraving: Lena; Size: 52; Gift message: Congratulations still has to be split by hand before anyone can sort by size or merge the text into a design file.
• Everything lands in one column in Excel. Many European Excel setups expect a semicolon instead of a comma in a CSV. An XLSX file avoids this.
• Accents and emoji look broken. The CSV opened with the wrong encoding. Import it through Excel’s data import, or use XLSX.
• Orders change after export. If an order is edited after you export, export again or note the change on the sheet.

Where Columna: Order Export & Sheets fits

Columna: Order Export & Sheets is a Shopify app that exports Shopify orders to CSV or XLSX with line-item properties such as engraving text, gift messages and upload links, and the file is processed in your browser. It is made for shops that hand orders to production, fulfilment or accounting.

The app finds the property keys used in your last 250 orders and lets you pick the ones you need, each as its own column named Property: <key>. If you prefer, the Properties column keeps all of them together. You save the columns as a reusable template, filter by payment status, fulfillment status, date range and tags, and download CSV or XLSX. You can also send the export to a Google Sheets spreadsheet you connect.

If you are tired of opening orders one by one to read what was ordered, try Columna: Order Export & Sheets on the Shopify App Store.