Mapping and Supplier Profiles
Answer what their columns mean once.
Every supplier names things differently and none of them name things the way your platform does. We propose the mapping, show you what each proposal would produce, and then remember your answers.
Proposed by us, decided by you
Each column arrives with a proposal and a confidence: confident, likely, or open. Confident proposals are pre-selected; open ones are not, and they are not quietly dropped either — an unmapped column is shown as unmapped rather than omitted from the screen.
Beside every proposal is a live preview of the interpretation. That is the part that catches the expensive mistakes, because the question is almost never “is this the price column?” and almost always “is this price in cents, in the supplier’s currency, tax-inclusive, or per case?” A column name cannot answer that. A preview of the value we would write can.
Two columns claiming one field is refused, and both are named. Resolving it silently to whichever column was read last is how a catalogue ends up priced from a field nobody chose.
A real answered question
From a supplier feed in the test corpus. Column names only — never a cell.
variant id- Proposed as
Variant Barcode, open rather than confident. Confirming it also cleared a duplicate-SKU claim the validator had raised, because the two columns were describing different things. - Result
- Saved as a Supplier Profile. The same file re-dropped came back 9 mapped, 2 skipped, 0 open, under a banner naming the profile.
The profile is the thing that compounds
Month one is the work
A new supplier is a set of questions: what these columns mean, what units they are in, which of them you do not want at all. You answer them once, with a preview in front of you rather than from memory.
Month two is a click
The next file from the same supplier is recognised by its shape — the column names, their order, their types — and arrives already answered. What changed since last month is what you look at, instead of the whole file again.
What a profile stores, and what it does not
A Supplier Profile holds column names and the field each was mapped to. It holds no cell of your data — not a price, not a SKU, not a description. The file itself is deleted in the same request that reads it, and the profile is what survives.
That is also the honest answer to the question this page invites: yes, the profiles make leaving harder, and no, we do not intend to make leaving hard. They are yours, they describe your suppliers rather than our software, and the security page states exactly what is held.
It has to survive the files you actually get
Supplier feeds are not tidy, and a mapping screen that only works on tidy files solves the half of the problem nobody has.
- 614 columns
- A wholesale linesheet in the test corpus is 614 columns wide. The screen stays workable at that width — filtered, searchable, and scrolling inside itself rather than dragging the page sideways.
- Encodings that are not UTF-8
- Normal, not an error. Detected rather than assumed, in Latin and Cyrillic, because a mojibake product title is a defect that survives all the way to a storefront.
- Deliberately adversarial cases
- Two columns mapped to one field refuses to save and names both. That case is in the test suite because it was tried by hand first and the screen had to be told to mind.
Start with the report, not the mapping.
The free Pre-Flight Report needs no mapping and no account. Map a supplier when you have decided the tool is worth the ten minutes.
Check a file free