Key takeaways
- An import is a snapshot. A catalogue is a moving thing. The gap between them is where money leaks.
- Overselling costs more than a refund: it costs the review, and eventually the processor's confidence.
- Most suppliers offer no feed at all, which rules out the tidy answer for the majority of stores.
- Whatever you use, match on SKU and mark removed items out of stock rather than deleting them.
You imported your supplier's catalogue in March. It is now August. Somewhere in between, they raised prices on a third of the range, discontinued eighty products, and added two hundred more.
Your store knows about none of it. Every one of those is a small, quiet loss, and they compound.
What actually drifts, and what it costs
| Drift | What the customer sees | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| Supplier raised the price | Nothing | You sell below margin until you reconcile, possibly for months |
| Supplier sold out | An in-stock product | Refund, apology, and a review you cannot delete |
| Supplier discontinued it | An in-stock product | Same, but permanent, and you find out from a customer |
| Supplier added new lines | Nothing | Competitors who sync carry them and you do not |
| Supplier changed a description | Old copy | Usually harmless, occasionally a compliance problem |
The second and third rows are the expensive ones, and not because of the refund. Refunds are survivable. What is not survivable is a pattern of them: chargeback ratios and dispute rates are watched by your payment processor, and a store that regularly sells what it cannot ship starts to look like a risk account.
The asymmetry matters. Being slightly out of date on a price costs you a few percent of margin. Being out of date on stock costs you the customer, the review, and eventually the processor's patience. If you can only sync one field, sync stock.
Option 1: Re-import a CSV by hand
Request an updated file, reformat it, recalculate your margins, import with "update existing products" ticked, fix whatever duplicated.
Works when: you have one supplier, a few hundred products, and prices that rarely move.
Falls apart when: anything grows. It is roughly an hour a week per supplier, forever, and the failure mode is silent. Miss a week and you are selling March prices in August with no indication anything is wrong.
The mechanics, including the SKU matching that stops it duplicating your catalogue, are in how to bulk import products into WooCommerce.
Option 2: Use the supplier's own feed
If your supplier publishes a proper product feed, use it. It is the cleanest answer available and nothing here improves on it.
The problem is availability. Most small and mid-size suppliers publish nothing. Of those that do, plenty offer a nightly CSV on an FTP server, which is a feed in the same sense that a fax is a messaging platform: it works, but you will be writing the glue yourself.
Ask. It costs one email, and if the answer is yes your problem is solved. For most people the answer is no, which is what the rest of this covers.
Option 3: Pay someone to write a scraper
A developer writes a script that reads your supplier's site, applies your markup, and pushes into WooCommerce on a cron.
Works when: you have unusual requirements no product covers.
The catch is maintenance. The script is coupled to the supplier's site. They redesign, add bot protection, move to a new platform, or simply change a CSS class, and it breaks silently. You find out when a customer orders something that has been out of stock for a fortnight. Now you are paying the developer again, on their timeline, not yours.
Budget for the second invoice, not just the first.
Option 4: Automated sync
Read the supplier's public catalogue on a schedule, apply your pricing rules, and push the differences into your store. No supplier cooperation, no script to maintain.
This is what Scrapify's supplier sync does. You point it at any WooCommerce or Shopify supplier once, set a markup and rounding rule, and connect the free WordPress plugin. Every hour after that:
- Price changes flow through with your markup reapplied and rounding preserved.
- Stock follows the source, so sold out upstream becomes unpurchasable on your store within the hour.
- New supplier products appear with your pricing already applied.
- Removed products are marked out of stock rather than deleted.
- Matching is on SKU, so re-syncing updates rather than duplicating.
If the supplier prices in another currency, conversion happens at the live rate at sync time rather than being frozen at whatever it was the day you imported.
Connect a supplier, then stop thinking about it
Any WooCommerce or Shopify supplier, whether or not they offer a feed. Free plan includes one live feed, no card needed.
Which one fits you
| Manual CSV | Supplier feed | Custom script | Automated sync | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Needs supplier cooperation | Some | Yes | No | No |
| Ongoing effort | High | None | Low until it breaks | None |
| Breaks when the supplier redesigns | No | No | Yes | Handled for you |
| Markup reapplied automatically | No | Rarely | If built | Yes |
| Scales past one supplier | Poorly | Yes | Expensively | Yes |
| Upfront cost | None | None | High | Subscription |
Four rules, whichever you choose
1. Match on SKU, and never reuse one
SKU is the only stable link between your product and the supplier's. Without it, every sync is a fresh import and you accumulate duplicates. Assign SKUs to everything before you start syncing, not after.
2. Mark removed products out of stock, do not delete them
Deleting takes the URL, its ranking and any inbound links with it, and leaves a 404. Out of stock keeps the page, stops the sale, and lets the product return cleanly if the supplier restocks. This is free SEO protection and people skip it constantly.
3. Protect the content you have rewritten
If you rewrote descriptions for your best sellers, and you should have, then a sync that overwrites every field will undo that work on every run. Check how your tool handles this before pointing it at a live catalogue, and test on two or three products first.
Test on a handful, always. Whatever the method, run it against three products and inspect the result before letting it touch three thousand. Every bad sync story starts with someone skipping this.
4. Sync stock more often than you think you need to
Price drift costs margin. Stock drift costs customers. If you have to choose a frequency, choose the one that keeps stock honest, and accept that prices lag by a few hours.
When you add a second supplier
Everything above roughly doubles, except the manual option, which more than doubles because now you are also reconciling overlapping ranges and deciding which supplier wins on a shared product.
This is the point where most stores abandon manual syncing, usually after a month of intending to keep up with it. If you are planning to carry more than one supplier, it is worth setting up automation before you need it rather than after the first oversold order.
On Scrapify, each supplier is one live feed: the free plan covers one, Premium runs five, and Agency runs twenty five for people managing several stores at once.