SJ Dixon supplier files for two wallpaper shops

A range cannot be sold until it is listed

SJ Dixon sells wallpaper and decorating supplies from Wolverhampton. The family still runs the company. Trade orders go through Decorating Supplies Direct. Luxury wallpaper is sold on Beautiful Walls. Stock from a new manufacturer stays unsellable until the range exists on the right shop.

Manufacturers do not share a spreadsheet layout. Getting a range into OrderWise, the system SJ Dixon uses for stock, meant retyping the file into as many as ten import sheets. The person who leads product listing managed four or five products on a good day. Each one needed a title, a description, and SEO text, typed and then pasted.

Two rules never arrived in the supplier file. Shoppers are shown a brand. OrderWise has to record the company the goods were bought from, and that company is sometimes someone else. Wallpaper also has to carry three extra rows the supplier leaves out: a small sample, a large sample, and a sample roll.

The portal prepares the pack. A person releases it.

The spreadsheet is uploaded. Code copies the cells and applies those house rules. Uncertain cells are marked. Sheets come out after the listing lead has reviewed them, and SJ Dixon's staff load the pack into OrderWise themselves. Photos stay with the team. So does a later edit of the SEO text.

A known supplier is spotted from the column titles, and the file is read with ordinary code. A supplier the portal has not stored yet is different: a model suggests which column belongs in which OrderWise field. The listing lead accepts or amends that suggestion, and the accepted map is kept so the next file from that supplier skips the suggestion step.

Variants are gathered under a product and assigned the codes SJ Dixon uses internally. For wallpaper, the three sample rows are created at the same time, including the accounting treatment each row needs.

Titles, descriptions, and SEO text are drafted twice, once per shop. The trade shop is written in technical language. Beautiful Walls is written around appearance. The description is already broken into the three paragraphs that product page expects, so nobody has to rebuild the layout by hand. Categories and features are chosen only from lists that shop already publishes. On Decorating Supplies Direct the category tree contains 174 paths, and the feature list contains 379 values. A value from outside either list is rejected.

Flagged cells are reviewed, the import is approved, and the pack is downloaded. Each cell keeps its origin and a confidence. Under 90%, the cell is highlighted. The reviewer can type an instruction and have that one field rewritten. Approval comes before the final file is available, and the log records who changed which field.

Judgement is where the model is used: an unseen supplier's columns, the product codes, and the wording for each shop. The listing lead sees all three before anything is exported.

"already it looks like a lot less work than what I have to do at the minute."

SJ Dixon's product listing lead, after she was shown the portal for the first time

That was her reaction the first time she saw the portal running on spreadsheets of the sort already on her desk. How the tool should behave was settled by sitting with her and processing ranges she knew. In one case the brand the customer sees is bought via another supplier. OrderWise still needs that supplier's code. The title a customer reads still has to start with the brand. Those three facts, manufacturer, supplier code, and customer-facing brand, are stored apart from each other. Exports of that brand no longer need a manual title fix.

Proved against work she had finished the old way

It began as a discussion of the path a new range took onto the two shops, and of where the hours went. A proposal on paper covered the first phase. Appoly then spent time at the Wolverhampton premises, watched a listing happen, and settled the scope there.

The listing lead was shown the portal using supplier spreadsheets like her usual ones. Output was placed beside a range that was already live, one she had listed without the portal. Live supplier ranges followed, and the errors in those runs were corrected.

Laravel Cloud hosts it. Real ranges now leave the portal as exports. A single import covered one range of 323 variants. Handling images, and talking to OrderWise directly, have been named as possible later work. Neither is in the portal today.

The same inbound file in Australia

Distributors and retailers in Australia receive manufacturer spreadsheets whose columns miss the stock system, and sample or pack lines the manufacturer never includes. The useful part is the stop before the file is loaded. The portal can prepare the copy and the codes, brand and supplier remain different fields, and the person who owns listing approves the pack. This client is in Wolverhampton. The two shops are British.

The portal sits with Web Application Development. It is also Custom Software, built for this one operation. Mapping columns and drafting the shop text sit with AI Enablement.