If you’re a distributor, it’s probably a familiar tale when it comes to receiving product data from your suppliers. It tends to come in a kaleidoscope of formats: spreadsheets (with inconsistent layouts), PDF spec sheets, or from supplier portals with missing fields and images. Leaving them unmanaged simply creates a chaotic scenario for managing data. Your teams end up duplicating their efforts, onboarding SKUs becomes a slow and time-consuming process, and human errors tend to spread across every channel.
As a distributor, typically managing thousands of SKUs across multiple suppliers, manual fixes are no longer sustainable. To scale and compete, distributors need structured, centralised, and enriched product data instead of spreadsheets scattered around silos.
The challenge: onboarding data from hundreds of suppliers
When a new product range arrives, the immediate challenges are:
1. Varied formats
Supplier data appears in every imaginable form: CSVs, PDFs, XMLs, even proprietary systems. Wrangling these formats manually is too slow and inevitably prone to error.
2. Grossly uneven data quality
Common bugbears include missing descriptions, inconsistent units, or incorrect dimensions. It’s risky to blindly trust the usability of supplier data without checking and validating it – at worst, you end up with flawed listings, poor searchability, and high return rates when what customers receive doesn’t match with their expectations.
3. Poor and inefficient communication
Chasing suppliers for missing or unclear information creates costly delays and slows down your time-to-market.
Now, multiply those obstacles across dozens of suppliers and thousands of SKUs, and onboarding becomes not only an organisational nightmare, but more importantly, a serious bottleneck. Small teams can spend weeks cleaning and reformatting rather than focusing on strategy and growth.
The risks you run? Delays, errors, and inefficiency
Unmanaged supplier data chaos carries hidden costs and they compound.
Delayed revenue
Products sit offline while your people rush around fixing descriptions, weights, or visual assets like images and video. Every day of delay represents a further loss of margin and more missed sales.
Competitive disadvantage
Faster rivals with more effective onboarding processes capture market demand first, leaving slower businesses to feed on the scraps.
Customer frustration
Incorrect data not only causes confusion and irritation; it actively degrades trust. A purchaser who receives the wrong product size or specification is highly likely to return the item as well as being far less likely to ever risk purchasing from you again.
Abandonment
Merchants, partners, and even internal sales teams get very impatient when they can’t rely on the data. They end up bypassing central systems and revert to inefficient manual workarounds just to ‘get things done’. That undermines your investment in digital channels.
Drain on resources
Technical and commercial staff are obliged to spend hours firefighting data issues, leaving them with less time for higher-value work like building supplier relationships or driving new revenue streams.
Scalability limits
As catalogues expand into tens or hundreds of thousands of SKUs, manual processes collapse under the weight. What used to take days now stretches into weeks, putting a brake on the competitiveness of the entire business.
These certainly aren’t minor inconveniences. They have a ripple effect, impacting on cash flow, team morale, supplier confidence, and the chances of building a substantial and loyal customer base. When left unchecked, this mismanagement of product data becomes a roadblock, trashing any visions of strategic growth you might have.
The solution: centralise and enrich supplier data
There’s a twofold fix:
a) Enrich supplier data at the point of onboarding
b) centralise it using a Product Information Management (PIM) system for scalability.
a) SKULaunch tackles data chaos at source
SKULaunch was designed to solve the exact challenges distributors face when managing incoming supplier data. Instead of relying on manual fixes, it brings automation, structure, and governance into the onboarding process.
- Automated validation: Checks accuracy, completeness, and formatting in real time, so errors are caught at the starting line rather than discovered weeks later.
- Multi-format ingestion: Accepts spreadsheets, PDFs, spec sheets, and transforms them into structured, compliant data, removing the drag on resources of inconsistent supplier formats.
- Granular control: Enables approval or rejection of data at attribute level, ensuring only high-quality and usable information gets through.
- Supplier enablement: Suppliers themselves can use structured templates and intuitive workflows which enrich and describe products directly, the result of which is a rise in the baseline quality of incoming data.
- Integrated sourcing: Pulls missing attributes, specs, or images directly into the platform, eliminating the need to switch between systems or chase up information via endless emails.
- Optional SKUConcierge service: For those businesses lacking internal resources, a managed service handles the heavy lifting, delivering clean, enriched product data without you having to stretch your team to the limit.
What makes our SKULaunch platform especially valuable is that it doesn’t just manage your dirty data once. Rather, it creates a repeatable, scalable framework for onboarding, so that every new supplier or catalogue addition can flow seamlessly into your systems.
Your teams can trust the process instead of constantly occupying valuable time troubleshooting, allowing them to focus on what they’re really paid for – developing commercial priorities like pricing, merchandising, and channel growth.
b) PIM is the central source of truth
Once your data is validated and enriched, a PIM system becomes the backbone of the distributor’s operational agility. A PIM offers:
- Centralisation – one hub for all product information.
- Automation – workflows that capture, cleanse, enrich, and publish at scale.
- Governance – workflows, permissions, and audit trails for control.
- Standardisation – consistent units, attributes, and naming conventions across the catalogue.
- Multi-channel syndication – enriched, channel-ready data pushed to eCommerce sites, marketplaces, apps, partners, and feeds instantly.
Using the killer combination of SKULaunch and PIM, distributors are able to transform their product data management from being a constant pain point into a user-friendly, scalable affair, with the competitive advantage that will bring.
The payoff: measurable ROI
So, don’t assume that investing in clean, centralised product data is a project best left to IT. The fact is, that data is a key revenue driver. It enables businesses to launch products faster, minimise returns, develop agile operations, and consolidate customer trust (which, incidentally, is far more efficient than trying to regain it every time something goes wrong!).
If your teams are spending more time fixing spreadsheets than selling products, it’s high time you rethought your approach. Clean, structured, and centralised product data is not a ‘bonus’. On the contrary – it’s the infrastructure which the optimal performance of your digital offering depends on.
Get in touch with us today to discuss in more depth how to calculate the ROI of better product data for your business. We’ll show you just how SKULaunch can eliminate supplier data disorganisation at source, and how a PIM can turn inconsistently presented PDFs and spreadsheets into accurate, centralised, and sales-ready content. Working together, we can help you cut costs, accelerate time-to-market, and build the customer trust that drives long-term growth.