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How Building Suppliers Can Onboard 1000s of Products Without Burning Out Their Team

You know the drill. A supplier sends over a new product range—hundreds of SKUs. It lands in your inbox as a spreadsheet (if you’re lucky), a few PDFs, and maybe a zip file of images. Now your team has to make sense of it all.

Multiply that by five suppliers, and you’ve got a serious bottleneck.

For distributors and merchants in the building supplies sector, product onboarding isn’t just time-consuming—it’s overwhelming. Especially when you’re dealing with:

  • Technical products
  • Compliance data
  • Inconsistent formats
  • Small internal teams
  • And pressure to get new SKUs live fast
So how do you scale onboarding without exhausting your people or compromising on quality?

Table of Contents

Stop Treating Supplier Data as “Plug and Play”

The first mindset shift: you can’t assume suppliers will send you usable data.

Even the big brands send:

  • Unstructured spreadsheets
  • Missing attributes
  • Product names in all caps
  • PDFs with embedded specs
  • Image files named “image1.jpg” with no product link
If you’re relying on a manual process to clean this up, you’re always going to be stuck in firefighting mode.

Set a Standard—And Stick to It

You don’t need to boil the ocean, but you do need a basic data standard:

  • What attributes are mandatory for each product category?
  • What naming conventions should suppliers follow?
  • Which formats are accepted for images and documents?
  • How should they flag variants, multipacks, or accessories?
Create a supplier template that makes it easy for them to do the right thing. And when they don’t? You’ve got a consistent process for validation and feedback.

Automate Where You Can

Manual copy-pasting from spreadsheets into systems isn’t just inefficient—it’s risky. One wrong digit in a spec can cause serious issues for a trade buyer.

This is where a supplier onboarding tool like SKU Launch comes in. It lets you:

  • Collect supplier data through structured templates
  • Automatically validate it against your rules
  • Enrich and format it for your internal systems
  • Handle images, documents, and categories in one workflow
It doesn’t just speed things up—it protects your team from burnout and your customers from bad data.

Assign Ownership—Don’t Let it Drift

In many businesses, onboarding is no one’s actual job—but everyone’s problem. That’s when errors creep in, timelines slip, and suppliers get frustrated.

Assign clear roles:

  • Who receives and checks the data?
  • Who enriches or transforms it?
  • Who uploads or publishes it?
Even if you don’t have a big team, having a defined flow makes a huge difference.

Prioritise What Moves the Needle

If your team is maxed out, focus on:

  • Fast-moving categories
  • Strategic supplier ranges
  • Products frequently requested by customers

Don’t try to onboard everything at once. Get the core 20% right and build momentum.

Need to scale your onboarding without scaling your headcount?

SKU Launch helps building suppliers onboard product data from hundreds of suppliers—without burning out your team or compromising quality.

See how SKU Launch works and cut your onboarding time in half.

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