From line sheet to live portal: what a catalogue import actually involves
The catalogue you already have
No label starts from a blank page. By the time you are thinking about a trade portal, your catalogue exists in three artefacts: the line sheet (styles, codes, photography), the price workbook (per-size matrices, surcharges, option charges) and the terms you keep in your head (who gets which discount, who trades ex-VAT).
A portal launch is the job of moving those three artefacts into one system without changing a single number. That last clause is the whole game.
What the data really looks like
Anyone who has opened a bridal price workbook knows it is not a flat list:
- Per-size price matrices - a price for every UK size, per style, often
- with a percentage surcharge above a size threshold and different rules for a
- curve line
- Option charges - lining, boning, extra fabric, length changes, closures,
- each with its own price and its own rules about what combines with what
- Colours and bundles - colourways per style, and accessories that belong
- with specific gowns
- Photography - the images your boutiques actually buy from
A credible import handles all four as data, not as retyping. Styles, matrices and charges map across mechanically; photography attaches by style code.
"To the penny" is the acceptance test
Here is the standard worth holding any platform to: price the same order in the new system and in the old workbook, and the totals must agree exactly. Not roughly - exactly, including how each discount and VAT step rounds.
Rounding is where this gets real. Discount-then-VAT or VAT-then-discount, round at each step or at the end - reasonable people build workbooks both ways, and a platform has to match *your* workbook's arithmetic, then prove it across the whole catalogue before a single boutique signs in. When Jane Aston Bridal launched, the pricing engine was reconciled line-by-line against her original workbook for precisely this reason.
Launch is a beginning, not a migration
The import gets you live; the season cycle keeps you honest. Look for the ability to run next season yourself: export the catalogue to CSV, edit prices and styles in a spreadsheet - the tool your team already knows - and import it back with a diff preview showing exactly what will change before anything is applied.
That loop - export, edit, review, apply - is the difference between a platform you run and a platform you ring.
The short version
A catalogue import is a data-engineering job with a one-line acceptance test. If a vendor cannot tell you how they will reconcile against your workbook, they are planning to retype it. The full ordering machinery this feeds is covered in trade ordering, in depth.