Changing wholesaler or data feed without wrecking your website

On 29 January 2026, evo announced that its VOW business had signed an agreement to acquire the trade and stock of Exertis Supplies from Exertis UK, including its trade customer database (printinthechannel.co.uk, checked 29 October 2026; therecycler.com, checked 29 October 2026). If your website was built on Exertis Supplies product data, ask your account manager where that data comes from now, and whether the codes, content and prices are the same. The same job lands on your desk when you move wholesaler for better terms, join a buying group with a different preferred supplier, or a manufacturer replaces its price file.

This is the runbook for that job: what changes, how to map old products to new ones, what to keep, what to redirect and how to measure the result. It applies whichever wholesaler, buying group or manufacturer you are moving between. Disclosure: we build Orbit Commerce, which has its own tools for this, so we have a stake in the subject. The Orbit section is near the end, and every outside fact has a link and the date we checked it.

What changes when your product data source changes?

Usually more than the price file. A new source describes the same physical products differently:

• Codes. Each wholesaler has its own product codes. The manufacturer’s part number and barcode stay the same; a wholesaler code you used as your SKU does not.
• Content. Different titles, descriptions and specifications for the same pen or chair.
• Images. New files at new addresses, sometimes fewer per product, sometimes a different main shot.
• Categories. A different tree, so “Ring Binders” becomes “Filing > Binders > Ring”.
• Prices and VAT codes. A new cost basis, new list prices, different terms brand by brand, and VAT rates marked in the file’s own way.
• Range. Some lines the old source carried, the new one does not, and the reverse.

Your rankings depend on URLs and page content staying put, Google Shopping on product IDs staying stable, and your margin on prices and VAT coming across correctly. A careless switch breaks all three at once.

What should you export before you change anything?

Take a full snapshot before the first new file is loaded. You need it to map products, to restore anything that gets overwritten and to measure the result.

1. Every product with its URL, your SKU, the old supplier code, brand, manufacturer part number (MPN), barcode (GTIN), title, description, SEO title and meta description, main image, categories, cost, selling price and VAT class.
2. Every category page with its URL, intro copy and SEO fields. Check in Search Console how much of your search traffic lands on them.
3. Search Console page data for the last 12 months, with your top 100 pages by clicks marked.
4. Google Merchant Center product IDs and item statuses, plus clicks and conversions per product from Google Ads if you advertise.
5. Anything keyed on codes: contract price lists, customers’ favourites and reorder lists, punchout catalogues you host for buyers, and supplier codes in your back office.

How do you map old SKUs to new ones?

Match on codes that belong to the product, not to the wholesaler. Google describes an MPN as identifying “a specific product among all products from the same manufacturer” (Google Merchant Center Help, checked 29 October 2026), and a GTIN is assigned by the manufacturer, so both survive a change of wholesaler. In order of reliability:

A worked example, with assumed figures: your site has 3,200 supplier lines. Matching on GTIN pairs 2,850, brand plus MPN pairs another 210, and 140 are left. You find a sensible replacement for 90 of those by hand; the new source does not carry the other 50. At 30 rows an hour, the hand checks take about five hours. The 50 orphans need a decision each: find another source, point the page at its closest category, or let it return a 404.

Keep the result as one spreadsheet: old SKU, new supplier code, old URL, new URL, match method and a status column. It becomes your redirect map, your price check list and your launch checklist. Then fix everything keyed on the old codes. A contract customer whose reorder list points at products that no longer exist will notice before Google does.

Should you keep your URLs or redirect them?

Keep them wherever you can. Rankings attach to URLs, so the safest switch keeps each product page at the same address and changes only the data behind it: the same product record with a new supplier code, cost and stock source. If your platform lets you re-point an existing product to a new source, do that.

Where the new source creates new products at new addresses, redirect each old URL to its new equivalent. Google recommends server-side permanent redirects (301 or 308) mapped from old to new, warns that redirecting many old URLs to one irrelevant page such as the home page “might be treated as a soft 404 error”, and says to keep redirects “for as long as possible, generally at least 1 year” (Google Search Central, checked 29 October 2026). Then update menus, banners and links in your own copy so they point at the new URLs directly.

Redirect maps, chains and launch-day checks are covered step by step in how to change ecommerce platform without losing your search rankings. A change of data source follows the same rules.

Which of your own edits do you need to protect?

Anything you paid for in time or money: rewritten titles and descriptions, SEO titles and meta descriptions, photos you shot or chose as the main image, category names and intro copy, alt text and tidied spec tables. The new source knows nothing about them, and a careless first import replaces them all.

Decide who owns each field before the first import:

• The source owns: cost, stock, barcode, MPN, dimensions, weight and technical specifications.
• You own: URL, title, description, SEO fields, main image, categories and anything you have rewritten.
• Case by case: extra images, brand spellings and VAT class.

Your own copy matters more than it looks. Every dealer loading the same wholesaler file gets the same words, so what you wrote is part of what makes your page different. If a page ranks on your description and the switch swaps in the wholesaler’s, the URL survives but the page Google ranked has gone.

How do you carry prices and VAT classes across?

A new source means a new cost basis, so check every selling price before launch, not after the first order.

1. Load the new costs against the mapped products and recalculate selling prices with your usual rules.
2. Compare old and new selling prices line by line, sorted by the size of the change. Pick a threshold, say 5% either way, and look at everything beyond it.
3. Check the margin on your top 100 sellers, not just the average. The margin calculator does the sums ex and inc VAT, and markup vs margin for trade price lists covers setting the rules.
4. Check contract prices. Fixed prices keyed to old codes need moving; contracts written as list less a discount will move with the new list prices, so compare them with what each customer agreed.
5. Map VAT classes. Make sure every zero-rated and 5% line comes across with the right class, because a code your platform does not recognise may fall back to a default rate.

What happens to your Google Shopping listings?

Merchant Center knows each product by the ID in your feed, and Google is direct about it: the ID “is used to track the product’s performance history in Merchant Center and Google Ads”, and “If you change the ID, you’ll overwrite your product and its history” (Google Merchant Center Help, checked 29 October 2026). Google recommends your SKU as the ID. So if your SKU was the old wholesaler’s code and you adopt the new one, every product starts again in Shopping.

• Keep your own SKUs. Store the new supplier code in a separate field and leave the SKU, and so the feed ID, unchanged.
• Keep GTINs accurate. Google recommends a GTIN for every product with a manufacturer-assigned one and says not to guess or make one up (Google Merchant Center Help, checked 29 October 2026). A GTIN that changed in the switch points to a mapping error.
• Never recycle an ID. The same ID page says not to reuse a discontinued product’s ID for a different product.

For a week after the switch, check Merchant Center diagnostics daily for disapprovals, missing images and prices that no longer match the landing page. Feed quality for dealers is covered in Google Shopping for office dealers.

How do you measure whether the switch worked?

Note the date, compare like-for-like periods, and look for patterns rather than single pages.

How does this work on Orbit?

If the new source is a supplier connected on Orbit, you connect it from Suppliers, tick the products you want, and they import with images, variants, brand, category and specifications. Sync is set field by field on the connection, and per product where you need it: switch off titles, descriptions, SEO fields or images, and the supplier’s later changes leave your versions alone while stock and cost keep syncing. A “keep my edits” switch protects fields you have edited by hand. You map the supplier’s brands and categories onto your own, selling prices come from your pricing rules (percentage markup, percentage margin or a fixed amount, with rounding such as .99, matched by brand, category or cost band), and VAT classes can be matched to yours, with a switch to add VAT when the supplier’s prices exclude it. Cost and content changes then arrive in an Updates inbox showing old and new figures, or can be set to be accepted automatically.

Disconnecting a supplier keeps its products in your store and stops syncing them, and a product a supplier retires is archived rather than deleted. If the new source is not on Orbit, the product importer reads Shopify and WooCommerce CSVs as they are and any other spreadsheet through a column mapper; a file imported that way carries its own prices, so work them out first. The redirect manager in the SEO toolkit takes your old-to-new map as a CSV, and a slug you rename later gets a 301 automatically. The Google Shopping feed plugin has a free plan and a £3.99 a month plan. Supplier connections are on every plan, from Solo at £25 a month ex VAT. More on Orbit for office supplies dealers and the wider office industry, and the general routes for supplier data are in getting supplier catalogues onto your website.

Questions dealers ask about changing product data

What happened to Exertis Supplies?

In January 2026, evo signed an agreement for its VOW business to acquire the trade and stock of Exertis Supplies from Exertis UK, including its trade customer database (printinthechannel.co.uk, checked 29 October 2026). If your website used Exertis Supplies product data, ask your account manager where it comes from now and follow the steps above.

Will changing wholesaler affect my Google rankings?

Not if the URLs and the content on them stay the same. Rankings suffer when product pages move without one-to-one 301 redirects, or when your own titles and descriptions are replaced by the new wholesaler’s.

Do product codes change when you switch wholesaler?

The wholesaler’s own codes do, but the manufacturer’s barcode (GTIN) and part number (MPN) do not, which is why you match old products to new on those. Keep your own SKUs where you can and store the new supplier code in a separate field.

Will my Google Shopping history reset if product IDs change?

Yes. Google says the product ID tracks a product’s performance history in Merchant Center and Google Ads, and that changing it overwrites the product and its history (checked 29 October 2026). Keep your feed IDs the same through the switch.