How to manage multiple vendor feeds?

Technical Q&A
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1

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I’m completely new to this sort of thing and I’ve been asked by a client to try and set up an online store for them to complement their retail offerings. They have several suppliers who each supply a spreadsheet with their product data on it. Of course none of these match. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around setting this up.

  1. Is there an app or automation to map each vendors product list to universal fields? So that I can upload each CSV and it will automatically remap them and reformat them so they can import into Shopify?

  2. How do you deal with changes to the product data? For example if one of the suppliers discontinues a product and it is removed from their updated csv, how does Shopify know to remove it?

If I do #1 manually I can get it done for initial import, but not sure how to manage this ongoing. Also no idea how I’d handle #2 for product additions/removals on a regular basis. I know these must be common issues but all my searches have turned up half solutions or answers i’ve been unable to properly follow.

Thank you in advance for any assistance!

2

There are apps like matrixify and ez-exporter importer from highview apps for spreadsheet based workflows.

Otherwise it’s a general search of import apps on the app store.

Generally unless already using an ERP that provides such features you need to roll your own spreadsheet that combines the vendors data into a product feed in excel or gsheets using any custom business rules to then import it.

The custom business rules part is important as there are apps that can “map” one sheets fields to another name but most have no way to create complex transformation logic

If you need to roll your own bespoke ETL, see usemechanic it can fetch CSVs over either basic http auth, ftp.

And some other methods like google sheets.

https://tasks.mechanic.dev/demonstration-fetch-data-from-a-shared-google-sheet

For these types of questions you should create test CSVs and go through the process.

For this specific scenario, shopify’s CSV import doesn’t delete a product, nor do bulk deletion

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/import-products

So you often have to build some deletion process such a special tag, that’s then used in automations, or making a search or collection of products to be manually deleted by staff one by one or in bulk

If you need this automation services using a tool like mechanic then contact me by my email for services.
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