How to Standardize Product Categories Across Different Suppliers
Learn how to standardize product categories across supplier spreadsheets to avoid duplicates, confusion, and errors in reporting.
How to Standardize Product Categories Across Different Suppliers
If you work with multiple suppliers, you’ve likely faced the chaos of inconsistent product categories.
One vendor calls it “Shoes,” another “Footwear,” and a third uses “Mens Shoes” or “Shoe.”
Without standardization, this leads to duplicate reporting, messy analysis, and poor decision-making.
In this post, we’ll break down how to standardize categories across different supplier files to bring order to your product data.
🛑 The Problem: Inconsistent Categories
- Duplicate Categories → "Shoes" vs "Shoe" vs "Footwear."
- Inconsistent Capitalization → "ELECTRONICS" vs "electronics."
- Supplier-Specific Labels → One supplier says "Mobile," another says "Cell Phone."
- Reporting Chaos → Sales reports and stock counts become unreliable.
✅ Best Practices for Category Standardization
1. Define a Golden Category List
- Create a master list of categories your business will use (e.g., Electronics, Apparel, Footwear).
- Share it with all suppliers (if possible).
2. Normalize Case & Spelling
- Convert all text to Title Case or Upper Case.
- Correct common spelling variations ("Accessories" vs "Accesories").
3. Use Category Mapping
- Map supplier terms → your standard terms.
- Example:
- Supplier A: "Sneakers" → Footwear
- Supplier B: "Mens Shoes" → Footwear
- Supplier C: "Footwear" → Footwear
4. Automate Repetitive Cleaning
- Instead of fixing manually every time, save your mapping rules.
- Next month, apply the same mapping in seconds.
5. Validate for Duplicates
- Run duplicate checks to ensure the same product isn’t categorized differently.
📊 Example: Before & After Standardization
Before
| SKU | Product Name | Category |
|---|---|---|
| P001 | Nike Air Max | Shoes |
| P002 | Adidas Ultra | Footwear |
| P003 | Puma Classics | Mens Shoes |
After (Golden Schema)
| SKU | Product Name | Category |
|---|---|---|
| P001 | Nike Air Max | Footwear |
| P002 | Adidas Ultra | Footwear |
| P003 | Puma Classics | Footwear |
🤖 How RowTidy Helps
RowTidy automates this messy task:
- Upload supplier files → AI detects inconsistent categories.
- Maps them to your Golden Schema automatically.
- Lets you save mapping recipes for future imports.
- Exports clean data ready for analysis or e-commerce systems.
No more manually fixing “Shoes” → “Footwear” every month.
📌 Conclusion
Standardizing product categories is essential for small businesses and e-commerce teams.
It improves reporting accuracy, inventory control, and business decisions.
By combining clear rules and automation with tools like RowTidy, you can keep supplier data clean — no matter how messy the files are.
✍️ Struggling with messy supplier categories?
👉 Try RowTidy and standardize your product data in minutes.