A single catalogue built from several suppliers
A distributor of customisable promotional items worked with several European suppliers, each with its own catalogue format, its own photos, and its own stock logic.
The context
The store sold customisable promotional items to business customers. The actual catalogue didn't come from one place: several European suppliers in the sector each provided their own references, with different exchange formats, category naming that didn't line up from one supplier to another, and varying update frequencies. Managing that by hand, supplier by supplier, would have taken a full-time person just to keep the catalogue current.
The goal was a single catalogue, consistent for the end customer, without the multiplicity of sources showing on the storefront.
What I did
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Reviewed the supplier sources
Analysed the APIs and feeds available from each supplier, including their quirks: separate authentication, different pagination, availability fields that weren't always reliable.
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Built a normalisation layer
Developed a PrestaShop module that translates each supplier's format into a shared data model before it's imported into the catalogue.
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Mapped the categories
Set up a mapping table between each supplier's own categories and the single category tree shown to customers.
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Deduplicated near-identical references
Detected identical or near-identical products offered by several suppliers, to avoid showing the same item twice under two separate listings.
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Scheduled synchronisation
Set up scheduled tasks that pull stock and prices at regular intervals, logging any discrepancies detected.
What required the most care
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Stock reliability
Some suppliers report availability that doesn't always reflect reality at the point of order: the module flags the discrepancies instead of hiding them.
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Consistency of product pages
Descriptions and technical specifications arrive in inconsistent formats, with units and labels that needed harmonising.
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Resilience to supplier outages
A supplier that's temporarily unavailable shouldn't block synchronisation for the others or break the existing catalogue.
Frequently asked questions
How many suppliers can be integrated this way?
What happens if a supplier changes its exchange format?
How are duplicates between suppliers handled?
Can the catalogue evolve after going into production?
Describe your need in one minute
A few targeted questions so I can reply with an estimate rather than another questionnaire.