Altera Benchmark Test Files

Sample CSV files for testing import performance on Shopify import/export apps. Use these to compare apps on your own store, on your own data shapes — no marketing in the way.

Our own results from running these files are in Altera's benchmarking blog post.

What's included

File	Records	Total rows
orders_10.csv	10 orders	18
orders_100.csv	100 orders	172
orders_1000.csv	1,000 orders	1,682
orders_10000.csv	10,000 orders	17,068
products_10_draft.csv	10 products	617
products_100_draft.csv	100 products	856
products_1000_draft.csv	1,000 products	2,525
products_10000_draft.csv	10,000 products	30,703
products_10_price_update.csv	612 variants	613
products_100_price_update.csv	820 variants	821
products_1000_price_update.csv	2,111 variants	2,112
products_10000_price_update.csv	26,735 variants	26,736

Draft product files create products in draft status, so they don't appear on your storefront and are easy to clean up afterward. Price update files update variant prices and compare-at prices on existing products, matched by SKU.

All order files use email addresses on example.com, a domain reserved by RFC 2606 for testing. These addresses can never receive real mail.

All test products and orders are tagged altera-benchmark so you can find and delete them in one filter afterward.

Before you run order imports — important

Disable order automations and staff notifications on your test store before importing the order files.

Even though all email addresses are on example.com, Shopify and any installed apps will treat these as real orders the moment they're created. Depending on your stack, that can mean:

• Order confirmation emails fired toward example.com (these fail silently but still consume API quota)
• Staff order notifications sent to your team
• Shopify Flow workflows triggered
• Notifications fired to fulfillment apps, email marketing, accounting tools, ERP integrations, and so on

Before running the order files, take a few minutes to:

• Settings → Notifications — disable staff order notifications
• Apps with order triggers (email marketing, fulfillment, accounting, ERP) — pause or temporarily uninstall
• Shopify Flow — deactivate any workflow triggered by order creation

The cleanest option is to run the order files on a fresh development store with no apps installed.

How to run

On Altera

1. Open Altera in your Shopify admin
2. Go to Imports → New Import
3. Upload the file
4. Confirm and run

Altera shows elapsed time on the running job and the total duration on the completed job page.

On Matrixify

1. Open Matrixify in your Shopify admin
2. New Import
3. Upload the file (these files use a Matrixify-compatible structure, so the same file works in both apps)
4. Run

Matrixify shows the duration on the completed job page.

A note on Matrixify plans: their Demo and Basic ($20) plans run single-threaded. The Big plan ($50) adds 5 parallel threads, and Enterprise ($200) adds 10+. Depending on your Matrixify and Shopify plans, you may see different performance characteristics.

Cleaning up afterward

Products

In your Shopify admin: Products → filter by tag altera-benchmark → select all → bulk delete.

You can also run a delete job in Altera or Matrixify, filtering by tag.

Orders

Test orders are tagged altera-benchmark. Orders cannot be permanently deleted from the Shopify admin in bulk — they can be archived through the UI, or fully deleted by running a delete job in Altera or Matrixify (filter by tag).

If you'd rather not have even archived test orders in your store at all, run the order files on a separate development store you can later remove.

Sharing your results

If you run these files, we'd love to hear what you saw. Email us at support@getaltera.com with:

• Which file you ran
• Which app(s) and plan(s) you tested
• Your Shopify plan
• Roughly when you ran it (time of day, day of week)
• The duration

We're collecting this for a follow-up benchmarking post. Let us know if you'd prefer to be credited or kept anonymous.

File specifications

Product files

Each product includes:

• Title, handle, vendor, product type, and a small set of tags (altera-benchmark plus a few descriptive tags like organic, eco-friendly, gift)
• Body HTML (~40–50 words of realistic content)
• 1–2 variants for most products, with SKU, barcode, price, compare-at price, cost, weight, inventory quantity, HS code, and country of origin
• 1–2 image URLs (hosted on static.getaltera.com)
• 5 product metafields under the altera-benchmark namespace: material (single-line text), care_instructions (multi-line text), featured (boolean), rating (number_decimal), country_of_design (single-line text)
• 1 variant metafield: fit (single-line text)
• Status: draft

Each file also includes a few intentionally high-variant outlier products (handfuls of products with 100+ variants, up to ~500) so importers are exercised against the option/variant explosion path, not just the small-variant happy path.

Order files

Each order includes:

• Customer email on example.com
• Shipping and billing addresses
• 1–3 line items with realistic prices, SKUs, and product references
• Tags including altera-benchmark plus a few descriptive tags
• Currency: USD

License

CC0 1.0 — public domain. Use, modify, fork, redistribute. No attribution required.

Issues and contributions

Found a problem with the files? Want a different test scenario added? Open an issue or PR.