Before you start: get whatever the supplier can give you - a file, a feed URL, or just their catalog URL, and know which of their categories you actually intend to sell. See importing products for what each format needs.
Pick your intake route
Choose by what the supplier can hand over, not by what you are used to. Ask for the most structured thing they have, then take the highest route in this table they can actually deliver - every row below the first costs you more setup, and the ones near the bottom carry less of the supplier’s own structure with them.
1
Rule out a zero-file route before you touch a file
If your supplier is TechData, or delivers through WebshopImporter, which is also how the Shots feed arrives - connect the integration and none of the rest of this section applies.
2
3
Check the count the importer reports back
Every route shows you what it found before it commits: the row count and detected delimiter for a CSV, the item count and XPaths for a feed, the matched URL count and one extracted sample for a scrape. Compare it to the number of products you expect. A mismatch here is cheap; the same mismatch after 4,000 products land is not.
4
Spend your review on the low-confidence rows only
For a feed, AI proposes a mapping per field with a confidence chip - accept the confident ones and read the rest. For a CSV, auto-mapping does the same from your column names. A wrong guess you wave through is what quietly fills the wrong attribute on every product.
5
Save the setup before you run it again
Save a CSV mapping as an import template and a feed mapping as an Import Profile. This is the step that makes the supplier’s next file a five-minute job instead of a repeat of today, and an Import Profile can be scheduled to pull updates on its own.
Adopt your standards before the products land
This is the step everyone does last and should do first. Classification decides which attribute slots exist on a product - and everything downstream, from research to enrichment to a wholesale feed, can only fill slots that already exist.
1
Find the classes this supplier's range belongs to
Go to Products → Classification and search the ETIM classes tab by name, code, or trade synonym. Click View class before you adopt anything: the feature table is the honest answer to “which attributes will these products need to carry?”
2
Adopt the classes you need
Click Adopt class. WISEPIM builds a ready-to-use product family from the standard, with one attribute per feature, its value lists, and its prescribed units - products assigned to that family get the attributes immediately.
3
Bring in the categories too
On the GS1 GPC tab, drill to the bricks you sell and click Add as category. The full parent path is created with them, so imported products land in the right place in your tree instead of in a duplicate one next to it.
4
Link the families you already have
If you already have families and attributes, open the Mapping review tab, click Run mapping, then use Select safe matches to bulk-adopt the high-confidence proposals and hand-review the fuzzy and AI tiers. Your corrections are remembered, so the next supplier’s range needs less review than this one.
5
Switch on auto-classification for imports
In Settings → Import by Scraping, the Classification section files incoming products into your adopted ETIM classes and GPC categories as they land. Turn it on before the import, not after: it costs no credits, and it runs ahead of the enrichment chain so the family is already there when enrichment looks for attributes to fill.
Import a capped first batch, enriched on arrival
Never point a fresh supplier feed at your whole catalog with enrichment switched on. Cap it, look at the result, then scale.
1
Take only the categories you sell
Suppliers ship their whole range. Add import filters in Settings → Import so only the products you actually carry come in. These are project-wide defaults that apply to every import anyone on your team runs, so set them before the first batch rather than deleting products afterwards.
2
Decide what runs automatically after the import
For scraped imports, turn on the enrichment chain in Import by Scraping settings: web research first so verified facts land before anything is written, then Bulk Enrich for the fields you pick. For file and platform imports, use an After Import automation trigger instead, optionally filtered to that one import source.
3
Cap the first run hard
Set low Max products and Max listing pages limits on a scrape, or import a trimmed file. The chain runs on every product an import brings in, so a misconfigured chain on 2,000 products is an expensive way to learn.
4
Read the batch before you widen it
Open a few of the imported products by hand. Check that the family and category are right, the attributes landed where you expected, and the generated text is usable. Fix the configuration, then run the full import - everything you correct now is a correction you do not repeat 4,000 times.
Fill the facts, then the words, then the structure
Supplier data is thin on specs and thick on someone else’s marketing copy. Research first: writing on top of verified facts is a different quality of output than writing on top of a guess.
1
Run web research on the strongest identifier
Filter to the batch, click Enrich with AI in the Products toolbar, and start Web Research. EAN/GTIN is the most accurate identifier because it is globally unique; fall back to Brand + MPN or Brand + Name when the supplier gave you no barcodes. Test the settings on a single product from its edit page first if you are unsure.
2
Let it fill the identifiers the supplier left out
Research can discover missing EAN, UPC, MPN, and model numbers. Identifiers follow stricter rules than other fields: they only ever land in empty fields, every value is checksum-validated, and a value that conflicts with yours is flagged instead of overwriting it.
3
Write the fields a supplier feed is worst at
From the same Enrich with AI modal, run Bulk Enrich on descriptions, titles, and SEO meta to replace inherited copy with your own. Run it after research, not before, so the writing is built on the facts you just verified. Reach for Auto-Fill instead when you only want to fill gaps and keep what is already there.
4
Give the flat rows a structure
Supplier files list every size and color as its own row. Select the ones that belong together, click Bulk Edit, and use Group as Variants to attach them to one parent, so channels get a single configurable listing instead of twenty look-alikes. The CSV importer’s nested-data step can link them during the import itself next time.
5
Verify the batch as a batch
Every product remembers where it first came from, and that record never changes. Open Filters → Advanced filters on the Products page and filter on Import Source to isolate exactly this supplier’s products, then read the quality scores and the Presets counts across that set alone.
How to tell it worked
When it doesn’t work
The scrape preview matched zero products, or far too few
The scrape preview matched zero products, or far too few
The seed URL or the pattern is off. For category mode paste the listing page, not a single product; for sitemap mode paste a real product URL so the pattern can be learned. Adjust the product URL pattern override and preview again - see web scraping import.
The supplier's site blocks the crawler
The supplier's site blocks the crawler
Some shops sit behind bot protection, and WISEPIM names the service doing the blocking rather than failing vaguely. The documented way through is the browser extension: install it, choose the project it imports into, click Connect this browser, then open the supplier’s product pages yourself. Same extraction, on sites the crawler cannot reach - see web scraping import.
Web research found nothing for a lot of products
Web research found nothing for a lot of products
Usually the identifier is wrong, or the product is too new or too niche to have public data. Try a different identifier type: if EAN returns nothing, Brand + Name or model number often does. See Web Research.
Fewer products imported than the supplier's file contains
Fewer products imported than the supplier's file contains
Check your import filters first - they are project-wide defaults in Import settings. Then check your validation mode, which decides whether rows with errors are skipped. Distributor feeds can have their own rules too: TechData only imports an article that has both a price line and a stock line.
The BMEcat imported, but the ETIM features look off
The BMEcat imported, but the ETIM features look off
The catalog most likely declares an ETIM release you have not installed. WISEPIM warns you and applies the features against your newest installed release instead, which is usually close but not identical. If your partner needs an exact match, import the declared release from Classification first, then re-run the import.
Related
Classification (ETIM & GS1 GPC)
Adopt the classes and categories that give imported products their attribute slots.
Feed Hub
XML, RSS, and BMEcat import with AI mapping and reusable import profiles.
Build a pipeline that runs itself
Promote this manual sequence into an automation once it works.
Migrate platforms without losing data
The same middle-layer approach, applied to replatforming instead of a supplier.