The supplier portal: let suppliers do the data entry, keep the approval

Suppliers log in to their own portal

Suppliers get their own accounts and their own screens: their product list, a bulk upload, a bulk image upload and their settings. They never see another supplier's catalogue, your margins or your customers.

Products carry the supplier reference along with the commercial fields you would not want in a supplier's hands to edit freely, cost price, tax class, digital and backorder flags.

Everything arrives as a batch you review

An upload becomes an import batch with a status of draft, submitted, applied, failed or cancelled. Each row keeps its raw values, the normalised values the platform derived, and how it was matched to an existing product. Nothing is written into the live catalogue until it is applied.

That is the whole point of the design: the supplier does the typing, your team does the approving, and the approval decisions are recorded in a supplier review audit rather than lost in email.

• Raw and normalised values kept side by side, so a bad unit conversion is visible
• Match type recorded per row, you can see what it attached to before you approve
• Batches can be cancelled without touching live product data

Images are treated as a separate queue

Image submissions have their own upload path and their own store, so a supplier can send imagery for products that already exist without resubmitting the whole product record. Supplier emailer templates handle the chasing when a submission is incomplete.