Quick answer

A range of 300 to 500 products should take under a week to prepare and upload, provided the supplier data is usable. A thousand products takes a fortnight or so. When the data is a mess, and it usually is, the same ranges take three or four times longer. But the delay is rarely the uploading. It’s the weeks spent chasing a supplier for dimensions they had all along.

Your supplier told you about the new range back in March.

Some of it went live in June. Some of it is still sitting in a spreadsheet. A few products went up without images, and you’re not entirely sure which ones, because nobody has had time to check.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not unusual, and your staff are not the problem.

You’ve paid for stock you can’t sell

This is the part that gets overlooked, because product uploads feel like admin rather than money.

You’ve bought the range. The invoice has been paid, or it’s due in thirty days. The stock is in the warehouse taking up space you’re paying for.

And none of it can sell, because it isn’t on your website yet.

Every week it stays unlisted is a week that money sits still. Whatever payment terms you’re on, there’s a date when that invoice has to be settled, and if the range still isn’t live by then you’ll be paying for it out of what the rest of the business earned. That isn’t an admin backlog. That’s working capital doing nothing.

Trade customers don’t wait

Retail customers will browse, compare, come back next week.

A fitter won’t. He’s on a job, he needs a tray in a particular size, and he needs it now. If it isn’t on your site he’ll ring somebody who has it listed, and whether he rings you next time is anyone’s guess.

You’ll know better than us how often that happens in your business. It’s worth asking your sales team, because they’re the ones taking those calls.

Why it’s never as simple as “just upload them”

Anyone who’s done it knows this. Anyone who hasn’t assumes it’s typing.

One product is rarely one product. A bath in three sizes, two finishes, left and right hand, is one item on the supplier’s price list and a dozen variants on your website. Every one needs its own SKU, price and stock level.

The supplier’s data isn’t your data. They write 60×60. Your site needs 600mm x 600mm. Their category structure is theirs, not yours. Before anything can be imported, someone has to translate their file into your fields, and get it right, because a size written two different ways breaks your size filter.

Images arrive in whatever state they arrive in. Sometimes a tidy folder named by SKU. More often a link to four hundred files called IMG_0234, with no way of knowing which bath is which without opening every one.

UK TIP

Ask your supplier for every dimension in millimetres, and insist they stay consistent across the whole range. One product written as 60×60 and another as 600mm x 600mm will quietly break your size filter. You won’t notice. A customer will.

Then there’s the detail your industry runs on. Waste position. Tap hole count. Flow rate. Square metres per pack. Whether it’s suitable for floors as well as walls. Get those wrong and you don’t just have a bad product page, you have a return.

None of that is typing. It’s why ranges take longer than anyone expects, and it’s why the person doing it always seems slower than they should be.

We do this work every day for UK retailers, as product listing and upload services, and the pattern barely changes from one business to the next.

Why the person doing it can’t win

Have a look at who actually uploads your ranges.

They’re probably also answering customer emails, chasing a delivery, updating prices and sorting out this month’s promotion. Uploads are what happens when everything else is quiet, and nothing is ever quiet.

There’s no template, so every range starts from scratch. The decisions made last time were never written down, so they get made again, slightly differently. Nobody agreed where the range would sit in the categories before the data arrived, so the whole thing stalls while someone works out whether it needs a new section.

That isn’t a performance problem. It’s a setup problem. Asking that person to try harder won’t fix it, because the job was never designed to be done that way. If it would help, we can take the catalogue work off your hands entirely.

One we were sent recently

A retailer passed us a supplier file and asked why their own team kept getting stuck on it. On the face of it the file was complete. Every product had dimensions, images and a price.

The problem was the shape of it. Here’s roughly what the supplier had sent:

Product	Sizes	Finishes	Dimensions
Milano Bath	1500, 1700, 1800	White, Grey	1700 x 700 x 550mm

And here’s what a website actually needs before any of it can go live:

SKU	Product	Size	Finish	Length	Width	Height
MIL-1500-WHT	Milano Bath	1500	White	1500	700	550
MIL-1500-GRY	Milano Bath	1500	Grey	1500	700	550
MIL-1700-WHT	Milano Bath	1700	White	1700	700	550

One row has to become six, because three sizes and two finishes make six things a customer can actually buy. And 1700 x 700 x 550mm has to be split into three separate number columns, because a size filter needs the number on its own. It can’t read a sentence.

All the information was genuinely there. It was just in the supplier’s shape rather than the website’s shape, and converting between the two is the job. Their team had been at it for weeks without anyone explaining why it kept going wrong.

What it should take

There’s no published industry standard for this, so here’s ours. Measure yourself against it.

Range size	Usable supplier data	Messy supplier data
50 to 100 products	1 to 2 days	About a week
300 to 500 products	3 to 5 days	2 to 3 weeks
700 to 1,000 products	1 to 2 weeks	4 to 6 weeks
2,000+ products	3 to 4 weeks	Around three months

These assume around 700 products a week of full data preparation, which is what our team works to. One person doing it alongside another job won’t get near that, and shouldn’t be asked to.

Supplier lead time sits on top of all of it. If it takes a month to get dimensions out of your supplier, a range that needs five days of work still takes five weeks to appear. Worth separating the two when you’re working out where a delay came from, because the fixes are completely different.

IMPORTANT

Sorting your product CSV in Excel or Numbers before you import it can break the links to your images, and they’ll be lost on upload. Shopify warns about this in their own documentation. Take a backup of your product data before any import, because once an import starts it can’t be cancelled.

What counts as usable data

Five things need to be true:

1. A proper spreadsheet, one row per variant
2. Every specification filled in, with the units written the same way throughout
3. Images supplied and named to match the SKUs
4. Barcodes or GTINs included
5. Pricing complete, trade and retail

Most supplier files fail at least two of those. If yours does, the right-hand column is your column, and anyone promising otherwise hasn’t looked at your data.

The ranges you never finished

Here’s a question worth answering honestly.

How many part-finished ranges are sitting in your catalogue right now?

Not the one you’re waiting on. The ones from last year. Products that went live without images. Categories that were half filled and then abandoned when something more urgent came up. Specification fields left blank because the information never arrived and nobody went back for it.

Go and look. Most retailers we speak to find more than they expected, and they’re usually surprised by how long some of it has been like that.

Those products are on your website. They’re just not doing anything.

STOP AND FIX: PRODUCTS LIVE WITH BLANK SPECIFICATIONS

A product page missing dimensions or a waste position doesn’t just fail to sell. It generates a phone call, or a return when somebody guesses wrong. Find these before you upload anything new, because you’re already paying for them.

The things that go wrong quietly

A range can be live and still be invisible. These are the ones nobody notices for months:

Wrong category. The products exist. Nobody browsing your site will ever walk past them.

Filters not assigned. A customer selects 600mm and matt, and your product doesn’t appear, because those attributes were never attached to it. As far as your own website is concerned, that product doesn’t match anything. Sorting this out properly is what filters and categorisation work involves.

Missing from your Shopping feed. A missing barcode, or a price that doesn’t match, and Google quietly disapproves it. Your ads run on everything except your newest range. Worth checking your Google Shopping feed against your catalogue now and then.

Specifications left blank. The customer can’t tell whether it fits, so they ring you, or they don’t. We’ve written before about what happens when product data goes wrong at scale, and the cost of fixing it afterwards is always higher than getting it right first time.

What we’d fix first

Four things, all of which you can do without anyone’s help.

Ask the supplier before the range arrives, not after. Send them a list of exactly what you need and the format you need it in. Dimensions with consistent units, images named by SKU, barcodes, trade and retail pricing, and the specification fields your customers actually ask about. Most suppliers will send it if asked properly. Almost none will send it unprompted.

Agree where it goes before the data lands. New category or existing? Which filters apply? Half an hour of decisions saves three weeks of nobody wanting to make the wrong call.

Launch in stages. Get your fifty best sellers live in the first week and let the rest follow. Waiting until a range is perfect is the most common reason nothing goes live at all.

Give one person the job. Not the whole job, necessarily. Just the responsibility for knowing where it is. Ranges stall because everyone assumes somebody else is on it.

If you want a broader look at what should be happening to your catalogue month to month, our maintenance checklist for UK stores covers the rest of it.

Work out where your own time goes

Take your last range and write down three dates.

1. When the supplier first told you about it
2. When you actually had usable data in your hands
3. When it went live

The gap between one and two is your supplier problem. The gap between two and three is your process problem. Almost always, one of those two numbers is far larger than you expected, and it’s usually the first.

Once you know which, you know what to fix.

Questions we get asked

How long does it take to upload 1,000 products?

One to two weeks with usable supplier data, and four to six weeks without it. The uploading itself is quick. What takes the time is preparing the data, processing images and checking the results before anything goes live.

How many products can I import into Shopify at once?

There’s no product count limit, but Shopify’s own guidance is that a product CSV can’t exceed 15MB. How many products that covers depends on how much data each one carries. Larger catalogues have to be split into several files and uploaded one after another, or handled with a third-party import tool.

Two things worth knowing before you try it. Shopify warns that sorting your CSV in Excel or Numbers first can break the links to your images, and you’ll lose them on import. And an import can’t be cancelled once it starts, so take a backup of your product data before you begin.

Can I import my supplier’s spreadsheet straight into my website?

Almost never. Supplier files use their own column names, their own units and their own category logic. Someone has to map those into your fields first, or your filters and search stop working properly. That mapping is the actual job.

What does it cost to have products uploaded?

It depends on how much work the data needs rather than how many products there are. Complete supplier files with images and specifications cost far less to process than files where dimensions are missing, images are unnamed and descriptions have to be written from scratch. Ask any supplier to quote after looking at your data, not before.

Why can’t customers find my new products?

Usually one of four things. They’re in the wrong category, the filter attributes were never assigned, the titles don’t match how people search, or nothing on the site links to them. New products are not automatically findable. They have to be merchandised in.

Should I use AI to write my product descriptions?

For marketing copy, with a human checking it, often yes. For specifications, dimensions and anything a customer relies on to know whether a product fits, no. We’ve written about a 5,000 SKU catalogue where that went wrong and what it took to put right.

Send us your next supplier file

Here’s an offer with nothing attached to it.

Send us the spreadsheet for your next range. We’ll tell you what’s missing, what’s going to slow it down, and roughly how long it would realistically take to get live.

No charge, no obligation, and if the answer is that your own team can handle it in a fortnight, we’ll say so.

We create and upload product listings for UK bathroom, tile, kitchen and heating retailers, and our team has spent years in this trade rather than learning it from a brief. If you’d rather talk it through first, get in touch and we’ll have a look together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Carter, Senior Ecommerce Strategist, Ecommerce Experts UK

Get in touch: ecommerceexpertsuk.com/contact