Online store owners love to dream about growth—expanding the assortment, attracting new customers, “boosting” sales. But behind these plans often lurks a silent saboteur: data integration problems.
It doesn’t make noise, it doesn’t demand urgent budget, but it quietly slows your business down every single day.
Look closely at your processes, and you’ll often find that the issue isn’t marketing or advertising—it’s that chaos has long settled into your product catalog and supplier connections.
Let’s break down the “invisible walls” that hold your store back.
You Have an Assortment, But It’s Like a Suitcase Without a Handle
Many stores share the same scenario: a supplier is ready to deliver hundreds or even thousands of SKUs to your site—but only 30–40% make it online.
Why?
- Some products aren’t relevant to your niche, so they get filtered out.
- There are no resources to process the full volume—your team drowns in spreadsheets and images.
As a result, priority is given to expensive or high-demand items, while the “small stuff”—cases, cables, batteries, mounts—ends up dumped into vague categories.
That creates three problems:
- These products are almost impossible to find in search.
- They don’t appear in upsells, bundles, or recommendations.
- They do nothing for SEO.
On paper, your assortment looks large, but in practice, it’s “dead” stock that barely sells.
Two Suppliers—and You Already Have a Headache
Working with one supplier is simple: you get used to their format, set up the import, and life is easy.
Add a second supplier, and confusion begins:
- Do you create duplicate product listings?
- How do you merge identical items with different SKUs?
- What if one supplier offers a better price, but another has better images?
And what if you have five suppliers?
This is where many stores give up. Some spin up separate sites for different suppliers, others ignore new partners entirely. Both approaches mean lost opportunities—because with proper integration, you could show the best prices from each supplier on your site, which is a major competitive advantage.
The “Format Babel”
If you have even two or three suppliers, you’ve likely seen this mess:
- One sends CSV.
- Another sends a 10-sheet Excel file.
- A third sends XML with nested trees.
- A fourth uses JSON.
Each one has their own quirks—price with VAT, price without VAT, images in a single link, images as an archive.
Instead of publishing new products, your team spends hours “cleaning up” data to get it into a usable format. And in the rush, small mistakes slip through—like a product’s weight listed in kilograms instead of grams, or a price shown in euros instead of rubles.
Updating “When Inspired”
Even if you heroically manage to load your full assortment once, it starts aging immediately:
- Stock levels change.
- Prices fluctuate.
- New products arrive.
- Discontinued products vanish.
If updates happen “whenever possible,” the problems pile up:
- A customer orders a product that’s out of stock.
- The price on your site is lower than your wholesale cost.
- New arrivals never make it to the storefront.
Customers don’t forgive this—they leave, and they rarely come back.
What’s Important to Understand
Data integration problems aren’t about “convenience” or “minor issues.” They’re foundational.
A poorly integrated product catalog is like a store with shelves full of products—but no price tags, no descriptions, and items placed at random. Technically, the products are there—but the customer can’t find what they need.
Ask yourself:
- How many products on your site are “dead weight”?
- How quickly can you load and update your entire assortment?
- Do you have a unified format for all suppliers?
Your answers are the first step toward real growth—not the illusion of expansion.
Quick Self-Check: How Healthy Is Your Data Integration?
Mark each item with a “+” or “–”. If you have more than three minuses—it’s time to act.
- The assortment is fully loaded—your site has all the products you want to sell.
- Supplier data is unified—prices, stock, images, and descriptions follow a single format.
- Updates happen automatically and regularly—not “when someone remembers.”
- Duplicate product listings are merged—one item doesn’t appear multiple times in the catalog.
- Even small accessories and low-cost items have categories, descriptions, and appear in recommendations.
- Changes in price or stock from a supplier are reflected on the site without manual intervention.
- You can connect a new supplier without weeks of manual reformatting.
- Data errors are minimal—no situations where weight is shown in tons instead of grams, or prices are in the wrong currency.