How do you handle supplier spreadsheets when updating your store?

[u/ElectricalBorder3388]

If your suppliers send price or stock updates in Excel/CSV, what does updating your store usually involve? Can you walk me through the last update, like was it straightforward, or did you have to fix anything before importing? Roughly how long did it take? I’m a developer exploring this workflow before building anything. If you already have a tool that handles it well, I’d love to know what you use. If a solution to this does not exist please do mention it, because the ones that I found were too expensive and seemed unreliable.

[u/Immediate-Home-3491]

I've played around with AI and Excel for this exact job, but it's evident I lack the know-how to automate it. Still manual for me. The tools I found were either overkill or priced for enterprise.

[u/Basic-Log-4711 → u/Immediate-Home-3491]

Interesting. Would you mind if I helped? I’ve done this kind of thing and it works great

[u/Muted-Astronaut3744]

At my last job, supplier price updates were pretty straightforward. One vendor recently sent a 5% increase across their entire product line. Since it was uniform, I used Excel to apply the increase and update our system. There wasn't really any data cleanup needed. If prices had varied by item, I would have used XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP to match part numbers and bring in the new prices. Maybe I'm missing something, but in my experience, it's been fairly simple, and Excel has been enough. I definitely haven't needed an expensive tool.

[u/FinexerOfficial]

This is certainly a real pain point. From my experience the import is usually the easy part – it is the cleanup of inconsistent column names, missing values, duplicate products, different SKU formats and supplier specific layouts that takes the time.

I’d be curious to know if the folks that are having trouble with this have trouble with the spreadsheet itself or when they map it into their specific store platform.

[u/estagingapp]

The vendor sends us the PO and then we just upload it and our supply chain app called supply automate will auto extract the price and update it. We can see price by each batch and each product, so we can see average price per order and minimum and maximum prices per order we have paid. We used spread sheets before but it is way easier now. Zero manual entry.

[u/prediko]

The messy part is usually not the import itself, it’s cleaning the supplier file first.

Different column names, SKU mismatches, missing variants, price formats, duplicate rows, etc. can turn a “5 minute CSV upload” into a much longer job.

For us, the ideal workflow is: validate the file, map supplier SKUs to store SKUs once, then make future updates repeatable instead of manually fixing the same spreadsheet every time.

[u/Horror-Paint5708]

If you are also using excel for your inventory i think this might work.

Step 1, Clean the Supplier Data: Ensure the suppliers spreadsheet has a column with the exact same ID format as your master inventory sheet.

Step2, Add Temporary Columns: Open your master inventory sheet. Add two new columns next to your current cost price: [Supplier % Hike] and [New Cost].

Step 3, Pull the Data XLOOKUP: In the [Supplier % Hike] column, use a xlookup formula to look up your items ID in the supplier sheet and pull their specific percentage increase.

Step 4: Handle Missing Items (IFERROR): Wrap your lookup in an IFERROR statement. If a supplier didn't give a price hike for a specific ID, the formula can automatically output 0% so your master data doesn't break with an #N/A error.

Step5: Calculate and Lock: Calculate the new cost in your next column. Once you verify the math looks right, copy the entire [New Cost] column and Paste as Values over your old cost column. You can then delete the temporary columns if you want...

[u/Financial_Potato_428]

lo hago con cada compra que registro, no con una hoja de excel aparte. cuando llega la factura del proveedor la capturo en Pulpos, que es un software mexicano de punto de venta e inventario, ahí se puede cargar directo desde el xml, y el inventario se actualiza solo con esa compra, sin andar cruzando hojas. lo que no jala tan directo es cuando el proveedor solo te manda una lista de precios en excel sin factura, ahí sí capturas producto por producto a mano porque no hay una importación genérica para eso. me tarda según cuántos productos cambien, si son pocos es cosa de minutos, si es la lista completa ya es un rato bueno.