A supplier spreadsheet is a price list, not a product catalog. Treating it as one is the origin of most import problems.

Before touching anything

Save an untouched copy. Every later step should be reproducible from that file, and you will need it to diff the next supplier update.

Decide these six things first

  • Currency you will sell in
  • Target margin
  • Title style (length, structure, keyword placement)
  • SKU convention
  • Inventory policy (track, allow oversell, or hold)
  • Which products from the file you actually want

Deciding after mapping means redoing the work.

The pipeline

  1. Inspect — open the file, note the delimiter, encoding, and header row.
  2. Clean — strip HTML, repeated whitespace, and supplier prefixes from description columns.
  3. Map — assign each supplier column to a store field, or drop it.
  4. Normalize — prices to plain numbers, inventory to whole numbers, images to public URLs.
  5. Validate — find missing titles, duplicate SKUs, invalid prices, and unreachable images.
  6. Repair safely — generate handles, normalize values, fix statuses. Never let a repair invent product facts.
  7. Sample import — 10 rows, checked on the storefront.
  8. Full import — in batches if the catalog is large.

Repeatable template

Save the column mapping as a template so the next supplier file takes minutes instead of an afternoon. The Import Cleaner stores mappings in your browser, and CSV Splitter breaks a large catalog into header-preserving batches.