The topic of finding suppliers is as old as the market itself. It has been discussed countless times: compare prices, check delivery times, evaluate the assortment, clarify return conditions and verify the supplier’s documents. All of this is indeed important, especially for the product business. But this is the perspective of logistics, purchasing, or accounting.
However, if we look at choosing a supplier through the lens of product content, the picture changes entirely. Especially if you are working in eCommerce and have hundreds or thousands of product pages on your website and a database of suppliers you need to collaborate with efficiently. In that case, it’s not only important what your partner delivers, but in what form they deliver it. How well prepared are they technically to provide data? Do they understand what structured content is? How open are they to automation?
This is not just a “matter of convenience” — it’s a question of efficiency, time-to-market, and even profitability.
Technical maturity of the supplier – an underrated competitive advantage
Let’s imagine two suppliers. Both have the same assortment, the same prices, the same level of service. But the first delivers an Excel file with broken columns and lots of manual adjustments. The second delivers a clearly structured export, where attributes are placed in separate fields, descriptions are optimized for online publishing, images are provided as high-quality links, and product names are consistent.
With which supplier will you launch your catalog faster? With which will you face fewer problems updating stock? Where will you spend less time on corrections?
The answer is obvious. Yet why is technical maturity so rarely discussed in supplier selection?
Often this becomes an issue only later, when the catalog is about to launch — and it turns out that materials must be painstakingly extracted from PDFs or that category names don’t match your structure. This slows everything down: from website setup to sales launch.
When the supplier becomes your technical “blocker”
Poor content is not just “ugly on the website.” It’s a problem that drags along dozens of others:
- Missing or incomplete product descriptions? Conversion drops, returns increase.
- Attributes are unstructured? The customer cannot filter properly.
- Low-quality images? Little trust.
- No proper product names? SEO suffers, search works worse.
- No categories? Hard to align structure with your website.
If you have multiple such suppliers, it becomes a constant headache. The team isn’t working on growth but on manual data cleanup. Marketing can’t effectively promote products — because descriptions are useless. Content managers get stuck in spreadsheets. And you keep explaining to your supplier why an Excel file without an SKU column is simply not enough.
When the supplier is technically “strong” — business moves faster
Now the opposite case: the supplier provides an API or at least XML/CSV exports. These include:
- SKUs, names, descriptions, attributes — in separate fields.
- High-quality images via links.
- Data on stock and prices.
- Regular updates.
You simply connect it. No manual corrections. No hand-parsing. No weeks of restructuring. The content just works.
You bring products online faster. Update information faster. Fewer errors. More automation. Even if your website isn’t highly sophisticated, “quality input content” does most of the job.
But what if suppliers aren’t ideal?
The reality is: few online shops have perfect suppliers. Because the real market looks like this:
- Suppliers whose descriptions say only “good product, buy it.”
- Images from old catalogs with watermarks.
- Stock updated manually once a week.
- Categories and names from “2008.xls.”
And while you may want to work with them — because the products are good, the prices right, the logistics fine — every assortment launch turns into its own project.
This is where NotPIM.com comes in
Our project NotPIM.com was built precisely to end dependency on the supplier’s content quality. We can adapt, clean, structure, enrich and deliver content so that it’s ready to be published immediately on your website.
Important: We don’t “generate” descriptions out of thin air, like AI tools without factual grounding. Instead, we:
- Research alternative data sources: manufacturer websites, brand catalogs, aggregators, marketplaces.
- Use multilingual data, translate and cross-check.
- Find images matching the correct model or SKU.
- Use our own algorithms for data normalization, classification, and templating.
Even from weak or “non-existent” content, we make a usable version.
And if you already have a strong supplier — we’ll automate their data processing as quickly as possible and integrate without unnecessary pain.
Technically weak supplier – no longer a dealbreaker
That’s why at NotPIM.com we say: It doesn’t matter how good or bad your supplier is — we can handle it.
- They send price lists by email? We’ll set up monitoring.
- No descriptions? We’ll find them in alternative sources.
- Categories don’t match? We’ll map them to your structure.
- Everything is in Hebrew or Polish? No problem, we work with all languages.
- The supplier doesn’t see the point of descriptions? We do.
So instead of looking for the “perfect” supplier — you can work with any. We’ll handle the content.
Are there cases where we cannot help?
The honest answer: yes, there are. For example:
- Completely unique products with no data available online.
- SKU is individual, local, and found nowhere else.
- Supplier sells custom products without stable descriptions or recurring attributes.
- No labeling or logic to connect to.
In such cases, even our system can be powerless — simply because no data sources exist worldwide. But these are an extremely small minority of cases.
In all other cases we significantly reduce your dependency on supplier content quality.
What’s the main conclusion?
When choosing suppliers — don’t just think about the products. Think about the data. How ready it is for publishing. How well it fits eCommerce reality. How seamlessly you can work with it.
And if you already have a supplier — but suffer from their “data” — just come to NotPIM.com.
We:
- Normalize data.
- Find missing content.
- Automate import.
- Help you launch your catalog quickly.
- Make sure content works for you — instead of slowing you down.
And most importantly: You don’t need to be a tech expert to manage it. That’s our job. We know how.