How to Turn Supplier Invoices Into Shopify Products

TL;DR

Getting products from a supplier invoice into Shopify normally means retyping everything into a CSV or the admin UI. Ohavah eliminates that step - upload the invoice PDF and get a Shopify-ready CSV with all products, variants, and pricing filled in.

Every boutique owner knows the drill. A new shipment arrives with a supplier invoice or purchase order listing dozens of styles, each in multiple sizes and colors. Now you need to get all of those into Shopify so customers can buy them. The question is how.

The Manual Process

Here's what most store owners do today:

1. Read the invoice

Supplier invoices vary wildly in format. Some are clean PDFs with organized tables. Others are scanned documents, handwritten notes, or Excel files emailed as attachments. Either way, you need to extract: product names, style numbers, sizes, colors, wholesale costs, and quantities.

2. Build the Shopify CSV

Open a spreadsheet and create columns matching Shopify's product CSV format: Handle, Title, Option1 Name, Option1 Value, Option2 Name, Option2 Value, Variant Price, Variant SKU, and so on. Then manually type each product and variant into the rows.

For a single product with 4 sizes and 3 colors, that's 12 rows. For 30 products, that's potentially hundreds of rows.

3. Calculate retail prices

Your invoice shows wholesale cost. You need to apply your markup - maybe 2.2x, maybe keystone (2x), maybe it varies by vendor. Then round to a price point ($49.99 vs. $50.00). This has to be done per variant if costs differ by size.

4. Import to Shopify

Upload the CSV through Products > Import, review, and hope you didn't make a typo that creates duplicate products or assigns wrong prices.

5. Fix errors

Inevitably, something is off. A misspelled color creates a rogue variant. A missing handle duplicates a product. A wrong price needs correcting. Back to the spreadsheet.

This process typically takes 1-3 hours per invoice depending on the number of products and your spreadsheet skills.

Where It Gets Painful

A few things make this worse in practice:

Inconsistent invoice formats. Every vendor sends invoices in a different layout. Some list sizes across columns, others down rows. Some include barcodes, others don't. There's no standard, so you can't build a reusable template.

Variant explosion. A product with 6 sizes and 5 colors has 30 variants. Each one needs its own CSV row with the correct option values and SKU. Miss one combination and your customers can't order it.

Repeated work. You do this every time new inventory arrives. If you work with 10 vendors and restock monthly, that's 10 invoices per month, each requiring the same manual process.

Pricing mistakes. Mental math (or even spreadsheet formulas) applied across hundreds of rows is error-prone. One decimal in the wrong place and you're selling a $120 jacket for $12.

Automating With Ohavah

This is exactly what Ohavah is built for. Instead of reading invoices and typing data into spreadsheets, you upload the invoice PDF and Ohavah handles the rest.

How it works

1. Upload your supplier invoice or purchase order as a PDF
2. Configure vendor settings - markup multiplier, rounding rules, SKU format, size abbreviation preferences
3. Download the generated Shopify CSV

Ohavah uses AI to read the invoice, extract every line item, identify sizes and colors, apply your pricing rules, and produce a CSV file that matches Shopify's import format exactly.

What it handles

• Product names and style numbers mapped to handles and titles
• Size and color variants expanded into individual rows
• Wholesale-to-retail price calculation with your markup and rounding rules
• SKU generation based on your preferred format
• Proper Shopify CSV column structure (Handle, Title, Option1/2/3, Variant Price, etc.)

What you save

The work that takes 1-3 hours manually takes about 2 minutes with Ohavah. Upload, review the output, import to Shopify. The CSV is correctly formatted every time, so you spend less time fixing import errors.

Tips If You're Doing It Manually

If you're not ready to automate yet, here are some tips to speed up the manual process:

Start from Shopify's template. Download the sample CSV from Products > Import so your columns are correct from the beginning.

Build a vendor template. If a vendor's invoice format is consistent, create a spreadsheet template with formulas for that vendor's products. Pre-fill Option1 Name as "Size", Option2 Name as "Color", and use formulas for price markup.

Use VLOOKUP or INDEX/MATCH for prices. Instead of calculating retail prices manually, use a formula: =ROUND(wholesale_cost * markup, -1) - 0.01 gives you a price like $49.99 from a $23 wholesale cost at 2.2x markup.

Validate before importing. Spot-check a few rows before uploading. Make sure handles are lowercase with hyphens, prices don't have currency symbols, and every variant row has the correct handle.