There is no single button that exports everything. The main catalog and inventory fields are split across different files, so most jobs take two or three exports.
This article covers the New Experience catalog. Tell the two apart by the web address of your Products page. The New Experience page sits under Catalog, at an address ending /catalog/products, and nothing on it offers Download CSV. If your address has /inventory/ in it, ending /inventory/items-and-variants or /inventory/products, read Exporting your catalog and inventory out of Thrive (Old Experience) instead. Both pages can show an Actions menu, so the menu on its own does not tell them apart.
Which file to use for which job
What you need | Use |
SKUs, barcodes, prices, costs, reorder points, per-location values | Edit Variants spreadsheet |
Product names, categories, descriptions, shipping weights and dimensions | Edit Products spreadsheet |
Quantities and stock value by location | Inventory Report CSV |
A quick list of what is on the Products page in front of you | Nothing — the New Experience Products and Variants pages have no CSV or PDF download |
As much as Thrive exports, for a move to another system | The first three options — no single file has it all |
1. The Edit Variants spreadsheet — the richest catalog export
Catalog → Products (or Variants) → the Start Bulk Upload icon → Edit Variants → choose your filters → Generate Spreadsheet. You can also start from Bulk Uploads → Start Bulk Upload, which opens a wider picker headed Bulk Upload covering every kind of sheet rather than the catalog ones alone.
The catalog picker is headed Bulk Upload Products and Inventory and lists these sheets: Create Products and Variants, Create Products with Attributes, Edit Products, Edit Variants, Edit Default Prices, Edit Sales Channel Prices, Edit Inventory Quantities and Receive Inventory Quantities. Accounts with a sales channel that has its own editable fields get extra cards on top of those. There is a View all Bulk Upload options link at the foot.
Inside the Thrive shell the picker describes this sheet as: "Edit variant-level details like name, SKU, barcode, price, default cost, reorder point, reorder target, quantity, and vendors."
Main data columns
One row per variant: ID, Product Name, Product Categories, Variant Name, SKU, Barcode, Price, Default Cost, Reorder Point, Reorder Target, Vendor 1, Vendor 1 SKU (and more vendor pairs if you use them)
Then, repeated for each location you picked: Use Defaults, Price, Default Cost, Reorder Point, Reorder Target, Quantity In Stock
Next to most of these the sheet also carries an editable column named New … — New SKU, New Price and so on. Those are the cells you type into when you mean to upload the sheet back.
This is the only export that puts per-location price, cost, reorder points and stock side by side.
Filters you can set in the picker before generating: locations (one is required), categories, vendors, active or inactive, in stock or not, requires shipping, and created on or after. Particular products or variants are not chosen in the picker; they come from what you selected on the catalog page before you started the sheet.
Four things to know
It opens as a Google Sheet, not a download. To turn it into a file, use File → Download → Comma-separated values (.csv) in Google Sheets.
Simple products with no variants are included. Their Variant Name cell is just blank.
Pick more than one location and an item only appears if it is switched on at every location you picked. If your products differ from shop to shop, generate one sheet per location. A location filter is required.
Bundles are not on this sheet.
If the sheet will not generate
Bulk uploads have to be switched on for your account. The Start Bulk Upload icon is hidden altogether where Thrive is not the source of truth for your catalog.
Edit Variants needs two permissions: "Product management" and "View cost & profit margins". Without both, the card is grayed out and reads "Permissions required: Product management, View cost & profit margins".
A third message guards the button rather than the sheet. If the Start Bulk Upload control itself is disabled, it reads: "To use bulk uploads, you need either the "Product management" or the "Update stock counts & prices" user permission."
If your filters match nothing at all, Thrive raises an error rather than handing you an empty sheet. Widen the filters.
Generating sheets is rate-limited by how many you have started recently, not by whether the last one has finished. When you hit the limit the error names the number of seconds to wait; wait that long and try again.
During maintenance you may see: "We're upgrading the system right now. Your Bulk Upload will be ready to process once the upgrade is complete. Please try again in 1 hour."
Where to watch it and find it again. Your sheets are listed on the Bulk Uploads page, with columns Bulk Upload Type, Started By, Date Started, Date Submitted and Status. In that list the sheet is named Bulk Edit Variants. There is also a Tasks page: click your profile picture at the bottom of the sidebar and choose Tasks. The page is headed Server Tasks. It shows work the server is doing, with Status, Description, Progress and Updated columns.
2. The Edit Products spreadsheet — product-level fields
Catalog → Products → Start Bulk Upload → Edit Products → choose your filters → Generate Spreadsheet.
This one works at the product level rather than the variant level. It holds the fields Edit Variants leaves out: descriptions, shipping weights and dimensions, active status, and which locations and sales channels a product is switched on for. Product names and categories are on both sheets. The picker describes it as: "Edit product-level details like name, category, description, and shipping details."
It has no SKU and no price columns — those are on the Edit Variants sheet. If you want SKUs, you want Edit Variants.
3. The Inventory Report CSV — quantities and value
Which Inventory Report you have depends on your account, not on your catalog. In the Reports menu, the plain Inventory entry is the classic Inventory Report. Some accounts also have a second Inventory entry marked with a ⚡ lightning bolt. That one is the new Inventory Report, still in beta. For how the two differ, see The new reports: what is different from the classic reports.
The classic report downloads in one of two ways, depending on your account:
Download CSV in an Actions menu. See section 3 of Exporting your catalog and inventory out of Thrive (Old Experience).
A Download icon. Click it and choose Download CSV or Download PDF. A box opens that asks only whether you also want the results emailed. There is no Summary Only choice. The box tells you the report will be in Saved Reports when it is ready.
The rest of this section describes the new Inventory Report, the one with the lightning bolt.
Reports → Inventory (the entry with the lightning bolt) → the Download icon → Download CSV. Download PDF sits in the same menu, and those two are the only entries in it.
Picking either one opens a box headed Export Inventory Report. It asks two questions: Summary Only or Full Report, and whether you want the results emailed to you.
Columns you get, in this order: Product, Variant, Location, Categories, Vendors, SKU, Barcode, In Stock, List Price, Cost/unit, Total Value, Potential Revenue, Potential Profit, Profit Margin, Markup.
The report is saved either way. It goes to Saved Reports (Reports → My Saved Reports) whether or not you ask for the email. To have the report run on a timetable, use Actions → Schedule Report, which appears if report scheduling is available on your account.
Five things to know
Regenerating the same report replaces its saved files. The match is on your own user, the report type, the date and every saved filter, and the old files are deleted. It does not keep versions.
The CSV is cut short at 100,000 rows. When that happens the file itself says so on a line reading "... {n} results not displayed".
At 3,000 rows or more you get the CSV but no full PDF. The Export Inventory Report box warns you before you submit: "Your report line items exceed the 3k limit for exporting to a pdf and will export as a csv file instead. If a pdf is needed, adjust your date range or filters to get a smaller dataset." Summary Only still produces a PDF.
If you switch every column off, the export fails with "No columns selected for export" rather than producing an empty file.
Five columns are missing for users without permission to see costs — Cost/unit, Total Value, Potential Profit, Profit Margin and Markup — in the file as well as on screen.
Three things the Inventory Report leaves out, whatever you do: products with inventory tracking switched off, bundles, and products with a blank quantity. A blank quantity means no stock history at all, which is different from zero. A product at zero does appear, unless you set the filter to in-stock only.
You do not have to save or schedule anything to get the whole report. Choose Full Report in the Export Inventory Report box and Thrive builds the whole thing for you. While it runs you see "Your report is being exported.", then either "Your report export was successful." or "There was a problem while exporting your report."
4. The Products and Variants pages — no download here
There is no CSV or PDF export on the New Experience Products or Variants pages. The toolbar has Print Labels, and Start Bulk Upload where Thrive is the source of truth for your catalog. There is an Actions menu, but it holds Consolidate Products Across Locations and Activate Sales Channel Sync for All Products, not a download. The bulk-edit menus hold add a category, add a vendor, set Requires Shipping, add a tax rate and sales channel sync. None of them produces a file.
Two things to know before you go looking for it:
If your Products page has an Actions menu with Download CSV in it, you are on the Old Experience catalog. See the Old Experience article for what that file contains and how narrow it is.
Other lists do have a download. Vendors, purchase orders, transfers and stocktakes each have their own, so a download button somewhere else in Thrive is not a sign that products have one.
Use Edit Variants or the Inventory Report for anything you are going to rely on.
Which export carries what
Edit Variants sheet | Edit Products sheet | Inventory Report CSV | Products page | |
One row per variant | Yes | No (per product) | Yes, per variant per location | No file at all |
SKU and barcode | Yes | No | Yes | — |
Price | Yes, plus one per location | No | List Price | — |
Cost | Yes, plus one per location | No | Cost/unit and Total Value | — |
Quantity | Yes, per location | No | In Stock | — |
Reorder point and target | Yes, plus per location | No | No | — |
Vendors | Yes, with vendor SKUs | No | Yes | — |
Categories | Yes | Yes | Yes | — |
Description, shipping weight and dimensions | No | Yes | No | — |
Bundles | No | Yes, unless the Bundles filter hides them | No | — |
Format | Google Sheet | Google Sheet | CSV, download or emailed link | — |
What no export gives you
Product images. None of these three exports carries a product image or an image address.
A single combined file. Nothing joins the three exports for you, and they share no common key. Edit Variants is keyed on a variant ID, Edit Products on a product ID, and the Inventory Report CSV has no ID column at all. Pick the one export that holds the fields you need.
Still stuck?
Start a chat with us from the app or the help center. Tell us which fields you need and what you are going to do with them, and we will point you at the right combination.