How to tame messy supplier data into one clean catalog

If you manage a catalog, you know the pain: one supplier sends a tidy spreadsheet, another a PDF price list, a third just pastes products into an email. Same information, five different shapes - and your store import only accepts one. Here's how to converge them without maintaining a pile of find-and-replace rules.

Start from your target, not theirs

The trap is reformatting each supplier's layout by hand. Flip it: define your columns once - SKU, name, price, currency, unit, pack size, lead time - as a single template. That schema becomes the fixed target every supplier's data is mapped onto.

Paste each supplier's format unchanged

Drop the raw price list, the product description, or the pasted email straight in. Because extraction is AI-driven rather than rule-based, you don't build a parser per sender - one template absorbs the variation. When a supplier reformats next quarter, nothing breaks.

Keep types honest

Define price as a number and SKU as text, and they come back clean - no prices trapped in strings, no codes mangled into scientific notation. If a supplier omits a field, it stays blank instead of being guessed, so you never ship a fabricated lead time into your catalog.

Export safely

Export a consistent CSV ready for your store or ERP import. Exports are guarded against CSV injection - a real risk when arbitrary supplier text lands in a spreadsheet - so opening the file can't execute anything. Review the flagged values first, then import with confidence.

The payoff

One template, many suppliers, one clean output. You stop being a human reformatter and your catalog stays consistent no matter how messy the inputs get.