Completed work
Matching supplier prices to WooCommerce products
The prices were there. The matches were the problem. Updating a catalogue safely meant finding the right product identity before changing the numbers.
The problem behind the job
If supplier prices no longer line up with your live WooCommerce catalogue, the risky bit is not editing the spreadsheet. It is changing the right products and isolating the records that do not match.
What I was working with
A supplier price sheet and a website export did not give a clean one-to-one match. Updating the store by product name or by the order of the rows would have meant trusting relationships that had not been established. I used reliable product identifiers to bring the records together.
What needed sorting
The job was to update product prices while identifying the records that did not line up. There were website products without a corresponding source record and source records that could not be confidently matched back to the site.
Those two exception groups mattered. Neither was a good reason to guess.
Use the product identifier as the starting point
I matched the website and supplier data using the manufacturer identifier rather than treating the displayed product title as the key. That gave the price update a defined set of relationships.
The same principle sits behind repeatable import identifiers: a record needs an identity that doesn't change whenever someone rewrites a title.
Separate changes from exceptions
The matched product prices were updated. The unmatched website and source records were identified separately for review.
That distinction is part of the deliverable, not an embarrassing list to hide. It shows where the source and the live catalogue still disagree.
Have a price sheet that will not match your shop?
If your problem looks similar, send me the current setup and the outcome you need. The implementation may be different, but the same kind of thinking usually applies.
What came out of it
The result was a completed batch price update and an exception list. The work gave the business a clearer view of what had changed and where further checking was needed.
The measured result here is the completed update and exception list; commercial impact was not part of the measurement.
Where I'd use this approach again
Supplier updates, catalogue reconciliation and data migrations all have the same basic risk: changing the wrong record because the match looked close enough. Checking the price update explains the questions I'd ask before applying another batch.
For broader help, see product data and imports.
HAVE SOMETHING AWKWARD?
Have a price sheet that will not match your shop?
Send me the URL, what is happening, what you have already tried and what a useful result would look like. A small anonymised sample is enough to start - do not send passwords, credentials or sensitive customer data.