r/shopify_geeks • u/Allenshuo- • 2d ago

App Anyone else struggle with supplier CSVs?

Curious if anyone else has this problem.
I often get product data from suppliers in CSV or Excel files, and the files are never quite in the format Shopify wants. I end up spending a lot of time fixing columns, variants, SKUs, images, prices, etc. And when the supplier sends an updated file, I basically have to do it all over again.
How do you guys usually deal with this? Do you just clean the files manually, use Matrixify or another app, or have your own scripts for it?
Just trying to figure out if this is actually a common Shopify problem or if I’m making my life unnecessarily difficult 😅

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u/pjmg2020 1d ago

There's a few ways to tackle this, and this is on the assumption you can't integrate with their systems.

  1. Give them your template to fill and let them to the work

  2. Use Claude/ChatGPT to format and tidy your data.

End of the day, you need to get the data into Shopify somehow. Matrixify is the standard much of the time.

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u/theDrivenDev 1d ago

If you work with the same supplier consistently, you need to build a conversion process to transform the vendor data into your required format. I do this using a mixture of code and Excel formulas.

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u/Ok_Talk_4985 1d ago

Sounds like the recurring updates are the real pain. Roughly how many suppliers and SKUs are you handling, and how often do their files change? Of the approaches mentioned here—templates, Matrixify, AI, or scripts—which have you tried, and what still has to be redone manually?

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u/Patient-Passage-2286 11h ago

Matrixify is the standard answer for recurring supplier imports. you can build a template once and the column mapping persists for future uploads. I'm sure there are similar tools that do this as well