The 300-product evening
Every trader knows this evening. A supplier sends, for example, a 60-page PDF catalogue. The website needs the products. Somebody opens the PDF on one screen and the website on the other and starts typing: name, code, size, material, price, then crops a picture, uploads it, moves to the next. Three hundred products later, it is 2 a.m., and twenty of them have a typo in the price.
That evening is exactly the kind of repeated, rule-based work an AI employee removes. Here is how a product importer does it.
Step 1: it reads whatever you have
The importer accepts the formats catalogues actually come in: PDF, photos of pages taken at a fair, Word files, Excel price lists, and mixtures of these. It finds the products on each page, even when a page has a grid of twelve items with specifications in small print, and even when prices are in a separate list.
Scans and photos are read too. When a page is too blurry to read with confidence, the importer marks the product for your check instead of guessing a number.
Step 2: every product becomes a row
The output is a table, one row per product, with the columns a website needs:
- name and model or code
- specifications, each in its own field where the catalogue separates them: size, material, capacity, colour, packing
- price, in the catalogue's currency, as printed
- the product picture, cropped from the page
- category, assigned from the catalogue's own sections
This table is the heart of the process. It is what you review, and it is what goes to the website.
Step 3: you review before anything goes live
Nothing is published automatically. You open the table, scroll through it, correct a name, delete a product you do not sell, change a category. Products the importer was unsure about are highlighted. This review is where an hour of your attention replaces the whole evening of typing.
Step 4: translation into Arabic and English
Product texts are translated so each product has a name and specifications in both languages, written for a shopper rather than word for word. Technical terms you correct in the review table are kept, so the same word is translated the same way on the next catalogue.
Step 5: it sends the products to your website
Depending on your platform, the importer sends the products straight to your website with images and categories, or produces a ZIP file with the images and a spreadsheet in the format your platform imports. You decide whether new products appear immediately or stay hidden until you switch them on.
What this looks like in practice
| Typing by hand | AI product importer | |
|---|---|---|
| 300 products | An evening or two | Reading in minutes, review in about an hour |
| Errors | Typos in prices and codes | Uncertain items flagged for you |
| Pictures | Cropped and uploaded one by one | Cropped from the page automatically |
| Languages | Written twice | Translated into Arabic and English |
| Control | Published as you go | Reviewed first, published when you say |
The package, with what it includes and the current price, is on the services page. It fits well next to the trade manager; our article on running a deal from request to invoice shows how the same product data flows into quotations.
When it is not the right tool
If you have ten products that change once a year, type them. The importer pays off when catalogues arrive regularly, when they are long, or when the same products must appear in two languages. It also helps when you want a supplier's catalogue in your own database before deciding what to list, because the review table is a good place to decide.
How to try it
Send us one catalogue, the one that has been waiting the longest, and tell us which website platform you use. The first session confirms the platform and your categories, and the first table shows you exactly what the importer read.
If that catalogue is sitting in your inbox now, message us on WhatsApp and send it.