Distributor
A distributor is a business that buys products from many manufacturers and sells them on to retailers, usually under product codes of its own.
What it means
A distributor sits between manufacturers and shops. It holds stock from many brands, so a retailer can buy across all of them from one account and one price list.
Its product file is a second-hand description. It carries the distributor’s own SKUs and titles, may leave out the manufacturer part number, and sometimes puts its own code in a column labelled MPN. The barcode is usually the strongest link back to the real product, because the manufacturer assigned it.
A distributor can even have a barcode of its own for a product. Google’s GTIN rules allow for products with “a global GTIN and a GTIN specific to the distributor”, and ask you to submit each value.1
Think of it like this
A distributor works like a market trader who buys from many farms each morning and sells on to restaurants. The produce is the farms’, but the prices and the labels on the crates are the trader’s.
For example
A basin mixer tap arrives twice: as TAP-ARC-CH in a distributor’s price list and as NW/ARC/BM/C in the manufacturer’s trade file, both with the barcode 5060123456783. Merged, it keeps one SKU and one barcode, and NW/ARC/BM/C is kept as a supplier code so the next file maps onto the same product.
Why it matters
Neither Shopify’s importer nor WooCommerce’s matches products on the barcode: Shopify matches on the handle, WooCommerce on the SKU or ID.23 So the same tap from a distributor and its manufacturer imports as two products at two prices, unless the pair is caught in the spreadsheet first.
Not to be confused with
A distributor’s product code is not an MPN. Only the manufacturer assigns the manufacturer part number, so a distributor code in an MPN column will not match the manufacturer’s page.
Sources
- Google Merchant Center Help. GTIN [gtin].
- Shopify Help Center. Using CSV files to import and export products.
- WooCommerce documentation. Product CSV Importer and Exporter.