Eight feeds in, one catalogue out
Every sales environment in this trade starts with the same question: where does the product data come from, and is it still right? Our PIM brings in the feeds of the large suppliers, harmonises them and keeps them current — 74,136 products and 61,693 variants today.
The situation
Every supplier delivers differently. One a 200 MB JSON feed, the next an Excel per brand, the third an API per language. Colours are named differently everywhere, sizes too, and the photos sit somewhere else again.
Anyone keeping that up by hand lasts six months. After that the webshop stands still the day someone goes on holiday, and nobody dares say which of the two lists is right. That is not carelessness: it is simply too much work to maintain by hand.
The challenge
It is not importing once but every night again, without products going missing or appearing twice. A product that disappears today has to leave the sales environment but not the order history. A product that changes colour name has to stay the same variant.
And it has to be multilingual: a Spanish customer wants Spanish text, not Dutch with a little flag above it. That is more than a translated product name — it is a layer of its own next to the product data, maintained per variant and per language, that falls back neatly when a supplier does not deliver a language.
What is in place
Product data from eight suppliers, in the same structure and the same fields: New Wave with 26,239 products, PF Concept with 19,403, Mid Ocean with 14,843, XD Connects with 6,469, Toppoint with 6,154, Spranz with 758, Langenberg with 244 and Moxz with 26.
The translations sit in a separate layer: 398,678 rows across 61,693 variants in eight languages — nl, en, de, fr, es, it, pl and cz. The decoration data sits in a layer of its own of 426,573 technique rows. Where a supplier does not deliver a language, the sales environment falls back neatly instead of showing an empty field.
Honest about the limits
Two suppliers do not deliver a usable translation feed. XD Connects always returns the same language through the feed URL, whichever language you request; separate feeds are needed for that. At Toppoint the translation connection is stalled on a missing key.
We would rather say that out loud than have a customer discover it on a Spanish product page. It belongs to the same principle as the rest of this page: we put nothing on it we cannot account for, and we leave nothing out that becomes visible at a bad moment.
The result
One source for eight feeds, eight languages and fifteen live webshop environments, with a nightly log recording what changed and what went wrong. The question of whether a product still exists is no longer a discussion but a line in a log.
What is not here: how many manual import hours this replaces per month. That was never tracked, so we do not put a number on it. It is listed below as an open point, together with the question of which customer we could measure it at.
What the customer says about it
This quotation is a draft. We wrote it down the way we understood it from the conversations, so that it can be put to the customer. It only goes live once the customer has approved it word for word and the name and role are in place.
“We no longer open Excel on a Monday.”
Three stories that belong with this one
The cases are connected: the same catalogue, the same technique rules and the same agent come back in several stories. These three sit closest to what you have just read.
Send us one feed
You get a report on your own data: which fields are missing, which languages stay empty, which techniques do not match and how many products are not sellable as a result. Even if you do nothing with us afterwards.