This series uses Dingli, a Patisco demo account. Every system screen and all the data shown here came from real operations in the system, including the exchanges between buyers and suppliers; they are not mock-ups. The people and dialogue are dramatized, and the illustrations are for illustration only. Screens are shown in the system's Chinese interface; Patisco is also available in English and other languages.
In the story: five weeks before the trade show, Monday morning, 8:40
A letter in the middle of the night
A-Zhe opens his inbox. Jonas, the buyer at Velostrada in Germany, wrote at three in the morning Taiwan time:
Hi A-Zhe, we are planning next year's range. Could you send me your latest catalogue? Including the cassettes you make for our house brand.
Velostrada has its own brand. The 11-speed cassettes and chains in its web store are actually made by Dingli.
The catalog A-Zhe has on hand is a PDF a design firm made three years ago.
Document 101｜Catalog: The material a seller puts together to show a buyer what it can sell, with products, specs, and photos in one place. Buyers use it to decide what to ask about and to compare you against others. When a catalog goes stale, buyers come asking about old specs, and the two sides are out of step from the very first move.
The cassette's gear ratios changed last year. The chain's packaging changed too. The specs are in A-Mei's Excel, and the photos were taken before last year's show and are stored in . . .
"A-Mei, where did the cassette photos from last year go?"
"The shared folder."
"Which one?"
". . . The one with a date on it."
There's a certain irony here: the newest, most complete photos and specs for these two products are on the customer's website.
How it used to go
A-Zhe asks A-Mei for the Excel on LINE. A-Mei sends two, with a note: "Should be the second one, but the prices aren't updated."
The photos are in the shared folder, named IMG_3021.jpg through IMG_3188.jpg. You open them one at a time and work out which model is which.
From there, two roads. Lay out a "temporary catalog" in Word, one afternoon gone. Or have the design firm revise it, two weeks plus a design fee. Either way, when the next customer asks for a catalog, it all happens again.
Worse, whatever gets organized this time soon scatters again. Change a spec next month, and Excel sprouts another "latest_really_latest."
How it goes in Patisco
This time A-Zhe doesn't lay out a catalog. He brings the data into Patisco, all at once. After that, "which one is the latest?" stops being a question, because there's only one.
Where the data comes from depends on whose product it is.
Products made for a customer's brand: collect them straight from the customer's website.
Velostrada's web store has professional photos and English specs, for every gear ratio and every color. A-Zhe doesn't have to go save images from the site one by one. He gives Patisco the URL, and Patisco collects it all behind the scenes for Dingli and delivers it to the account.
In [Product Management], A-Zhe clicks [Import], chooses [Import from brand website (collected by Patisco)], and picks this data set:
- The columns are already mapped by default, and the site's selling price goes into suggested retail price. By default the system also writes that number into Dingli's base price, and A-Zhe unticks that: the website price is what Velostrada charges riders, not what Dingli charges Velostrada. Dingli's own prices get set in the next episode.
- The site's gear ratios and colors become spec tags, and different specs of the same model become one product group.
- The photos come in with the products.
Dingli's own products: A-Mei's Excel goes in as it is.
Choose [Import from Excel file]. A-Mei doesn't have to change her column names or their order. The system matches them by header automatically, and anything marked [Guessed—please check] just needs a glance. A few of her rows have photos pasted right into the Excel, and those get read in along with their row.
Either way, you can fix things on the spot before importing.
[Review & fix] flags the problems: this row has no product name, this one has a unit price but no currency, this SKU appears twice. SKUs that already exist can be skipped in bulk.
A-Mei takes a look. "DL-CS-11S twice? Oh, that's the one I added by hand last year." She deletes a row and moves on.
Every record gets a result on import, and only the failed ones need resending.
Products that only exist in an old PDF: hand them to your usual AI tool.
Choose [Organize with another AI (catalog PDF, photos)], click [Copy the instructions for AI], paste that into your usual AI tool along with the three-year-old catalog PDF, then paste its reply back. The original text and what was read from it sit side by side, and from there it's the same review and import.
That other pile of photos: rename them to SKUs and they find their own way home.
Take the trade show photos, rename the files to their SKUs, such as DL-CR-170.jpg and DL-CR-170#2.jpg, and upload them to Product Photos under [Shared Files]. The system attaches them to the matching product, with the first one as the cover. Products created later get filled in automatically as well.
Finally, have AI help sort by part and use.
The screen that shows the finished import has a button: [Ask AI to tag part & use]. The AI reads product names, specs, and descriptions, then makes suggestions: what part this is, whether it's a complete unit or a replacement part, which kind of customer it suits. For the five chains in this batch, it judged all of them as part "drivetrain," use "replacement part."
A-Zhe looks them over and replies to confirm as prompted, and only then do the tags actually go on. If a tag is wrong, tell the AI you want to undo, reply "delete" once more, and the tags it just added are rolled back as a batch.
"So the AI won't go changing things on its own?" A-Mei asks.
"It only proposes. I'm the one who presses the button."
Before vs. with Patisco
| Before | With Patisco | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the data comes from | Two Excel files, one old PDF, a heap of IMG_xxxx.jpg | The same things, plus the customer's website; no need to clean up formats first |
| Who keeps getting asked | A-Mei ("Which one's the latest?") | Nobody. There's only one copy in the system |
| Matching photos | Open them one by one and identify them | If the filename is the SKU, it attaches itself |
| When errors get caught | When the customer asks, "What currency is this price in?" | Flagged before import |
| Next customer wants a catalog | Organize everything again | Just share it (next episode) |
A word for the boss: Product data no longer lives on one employee's computer. Whoever takes leave, whoever moves on, the data stays with the company.
Further reading
- How Excel columns map when creating products in bulk
- How to read and fix the pre-import Review & fix step