The Starting Position
The export contains everything needed to identify each product and almost nothing a buyer would want to read. Writing descriptions by hand has been attempted twice and abandoned twice, each time after a few hundred products.
The commercial cost is not abstract: products without usable descriptions convert poorly, are harder to find, and generate support questions that a product page should have answered.
How the Work Is Sequenced
Import and Validate the Export
Column mapping is set once for this supplier's file shape and reused each quarter. Rows that fail validation are grouped by cause rather than listed individually.
Match Before Anything Else
Rows resolve against manufacturer and model. Ambiguity concentrates in a few model families where variants differ by one character, and those are confirmed as groups.
Attach What Documents Exist
Family brochures cover the largest number of products per document, so those go in first. Coverage is partial, and that is expected.
Publish by Coverage, Not Alphabetically
Products with document support complete quickly and go out first. Products without it stay visible as a gap list that drives the next round of document collection.
What Stays Visible
What Changes Operationally
- The quarterly export becomes a repeatable import rather than a fresh project.
- Human attention concentrates on ambiguous matches and review, not on typing specifications.
- The gap report becomes the document-collection backlog, so coverage improves where it affects revenue.
- Every published specification can be traced to the document it came from.