A supplier sends a new price list. The owner forwards it to me with one line: “Can you update the site?” On the surface it’s simple. In practice, a bulk price update is one of the easiest ways to quietly damage a store.
Get one column wrong and a $45 item sells for $4.50 all weekend. I’ve seen it happen. Not on my watch, but I’ve been called in to clean up after it.
Never edit prices in the store first
The supplier’s file and the store never match. Different SKU formats, discontinued items still in the file, new items not in the store yet. So the first step is always a comparison, not an update.
- Export current products with SKU and price from the store
- Match the supplier file against the export by SKU, not by name
- Flag everything that doesn’t match on either side
- Send the owner the flagged list before changing anything
That flagged list starts conversations that need to happen anyway. “This item isn’t in their file anymore, do you still sell it?” Half the time the answer surprises the owner too.
The sanity checks before import
Once the mapping is clean, I run a few dumb checks that have saved me more than any clever formula. Any new price that’s more than 40% different from the old one gets a second look. Any price under a dollar gets a second look. Any blank cell stops the whole job.
Then I import ten products. Not four hundred. Ten. I open those ten on the live site, check the category page, the product page, and the cart. Only when those ten are right does the rest of the file go in.
After the import
I keep the old export. If anything looks wrong tomorrow, I can put every price back in five minutes. That file has been my undo button more than once. A price update isn’t finished when the import runs. It’s finished when a week has passed and nothing strange has come through on the orders.
