The eight supplier feeds dissected
Who supplies what, in which format, and where it goes wrong — with the counts that are in our own PIM today.
A feed is not an export, it is a connection
Almost every conversation about product data starts with the same misunderstanding: that a supplier's catalogue is something you import once. In practice a feed is a connection that keeps running. And every supplier delivers differently — one a JSON file of two hundred megabytes, the next an Excel file per brand, the third an API per language. What your sales environment shows tomorrow comes from last night's feed, not from a file somebody downloaded last month.
You only notice the difference when something changes, and something always changes. A supplier cleans up his range, adjusts a volume tier or renames a colour. Work from an export and that goes unnoticed for weeks, and your customer finds it before you do. Work from a connection and it arrives the same night, is normalised, and is in the log the next morning. This piece is about what happens during that night, and about the places where it gets stuck in practice.
Eight suppliers, 74,136 products
Eight supplier feeds are in production today. New Wave supplies 26,239 items, PF Concept 19,403, Mid Ocean 14,843, XD Connects 6,469, Toppoint 6,154, Spranz 758, Langenberg 244 and Moxz 26. Together those are exactly the 74,136 products quoted elsewhere on this site, with 61,693 variants underneath. They are figures from the running systems, counted on 20 September 2026, not rounded sales numbers.
That distribution says something about where the work sits. The two largest feeds together fill more than half the catalogue; the smallest supplies twenty-six items. A feed of 26,239 items needs its own pace and its own checks, a feed of twenty-six barely costs any processing at all. That is why every supplier has its own connector, its own schedule and its own line in the log, instead of everything running through one import that waits for the slowest.
The counts are not a promise about tomorrow: they are the state at that moment. Which is exactly why the log matters more than the number — it does not say how many items there are, it says what has changed since yesterday.
What happens between two working days
The same thing happens every night, in four steps. That sounds simpler than it is, because the steps have to run in this order and all four have to finish before the catalogue counts as updated. A catalogue that is half updated is worse than yesterday's catalogue: it is correct for half the items, and that is exactly the kind of error nobody spots.
The reason we write this out here is that most questions to our support are about these four steps. Somebody sees a price that is off, a photo on the wrong colour or an item that has disappeared. In nearly every case the answer is in the step where it went wrong, and not in the customer's own environment.
1. The feed comes in
Each connector collects what the supplier delivers at its own moment and at its own pace. Nothing is overwritten before the whole file has arrived, because a file that breaks off halfway must not produce half a catalogue. If it does break off, the connector reports it and yesterday's state stays put — visibly, as a failed line in the log.
2. Normalising and matching
Colour names from eight suppliers go into one list, so that a “blue” filter also finds what the supplier calls “royal”. Sizes are standardised, variants hung under their base SKU and images matched to the right colour. A photo that cannot be matched to any variant ends up on a worklist instead of quietly disappearing.
3. Prices, copy and print data
Purchase and sales prices with their volume tiers are updated, translation lines are topped up and the technique rules per variant are refreshed. That last part is where most systems make do with a free text field: which area, which technique, which maximum size, which position and which price. With us those 426,573 technique rules are in the source, so Magic Logo and the quoting module can calculate with them instead of guessing.
4. That night's log
Added, changed, expired, failed — per feed, per night, there to read back. It is the first thing we open ourselves when you call, and usually the last thing you need to know whether it was the feed or something else. A changed purchase price does not go unnoticed for weeks this way.
Where it goes wrong today
Eight feeds from eight companies means eight ways of delivering, and in two places that does not work as it should today. We would rather say so up front than have you discover it in three months on a Spanish product page with Dutch copy. Neither is unsolvable and neither holds your environment back, but you hear it from us and not from your customer.
There is also a limit that has nothing to do with technology: we can only pass on what a supplier delivers. If a field is missing from the feed, it is missing from our source too. We do not then fill it in with something that looks about right, because an invented maximum print size does more damage than an empty field: the first produces a complaint at the printer, the second a question to the supplier.
XD Connects always returns the same language
The feed URL returns the same language regardless of which language you request. A multilingual catalogue therefore needs separate feeds per language. Until those exist, the sales environment falls back to English for this part of the range instead of showing an empty field.
At Toppoint the translation link is stalled
The link is stuck on a missing key. The items, the prices and the images do come through; the translation lines from this supplier lag behind until that key is there. We would rather say that now than at handover.
A feed rarely delivers exactly your range
It contains items you do not want to sell, categories named differently from yours and margins that vary by brand. You do not solve that in the feed but after it: adjusting properties of thousands of items in one action, reorganising categories, applying a price calculation across a whole group. What you set yourself stays put when the feed comes past the next night.
Start with a count
Anyone wanting to add a new supplier, or to know what their own data is worth, starts with us not with a demonstration but with a count. We look at what the feed actually delivers: how many items, how many variants, how many images, how many languages and which print data is usable. That tells you what to expect, and only then do we name a figure.
We would rather have that conversation up front than have you find out in three months that a field you need was never in the feed. If your supplier is not connected yet, we build the connector — but there too we first say what can and cannot be got out of it. That is not a disclaimer; it is the only honest answer to the question of what a connection gives you.
What this is about
The feeds in this piece arrive in the PIM/DAM module of Magic Studio and are broken down per supplier on the connected suppliers page. If you want to know what your own feed would do here, one conversation is enough to arrange the count.
PIM/DAM — where the feeds arrive
Product data and images that update themselves, with print data at variant level.Connected suppliers
The eight feeds with their counts, the nightly refresh and the log.Ask your question
Send us one feed and you get back what is left of that data once it has been through.Shall we run the numbers on your feed?
Send us one supplier feed or an export of your items. You get back how many items, variants, images and languages are usable, and which print data can be extracted.
Rather see first what a catalogue from eight feeds looks like in practice? Book a demo.