Catalog Check — Supplier Price List Comparison

Compare two supplier CSV catalogs and get a report of price changes, smaller packs, new products, missing products and rows that need human review. Use it before updating a shop catalog, purchasing spreadsheet or inventory system.

Example: a pack still costs EUR 18, but the supplier reduces its contents from 12 items to 6. Catalog Check reports a 100% increase per item, even though the pack price is unchanged.

What you get

• Unit-price increases and decreases, with percentage changes.
• Pack changes, including repacked products whose unit price stays the same.
• New products and products absent from the updated file.
• Review flags for duplicate product codes, invalid values, mismatched currencies and incompatible units.
• Source line numbers and complete JSON and CSV exports.

Calculations are deterministic. No AI model, external scraping, supplier credentials or third-party API key is required. The Actor does not modify your shop or supplier files.

Quick start

1. Open Input. The supplied example is fictional and ready to run.
2. In Current catalog and Updated catalog, provide CSV text, its delimiter and decimal mark, and the column names to use.
3. Click Start. After the run succeeds, open Output → Report files, or Storage → Key-value store.
4. Download CHANGES.csv for a spreadsheet or OUTPUT for a JSON workflow. The dataset contains one summary entry for the entire comparison; full product rows are in the report files.

This hosted Actor accepts CSV text in its input form or API. It does not host the separate local dashboard or provide a native XLSX/PDF file-upload interface.

Complete example input

{
  "currency": "EUR",
  "unit": "item",
  "previous": {
    "csv": "sku,name,price,pack\n001,Notebook,18.00,12",
    "delimiter": ",",
    "decimal": ".",
    "columns": {"sku":"sku","name":"name","price":"price","pack":"pack"}
  },
  "updated": {
    "csv": "sku,name,price,pack\n001,Notebook,18.00,6",
    "delimiter": ",",
    "decimal": ".",
    "columns": {"sku":"sku","name":"name","price":"price","pack":"pack"}
  }
}

Input options

Each catalog has its own csv, delimiter, decimal and columns values. Supported delimiters are comma, semicolon and tab. Use . or , as the decimal mark. Set column mappings to the exact header text.

Mapping	Required	Meaning
sku	Yes	Product code; leading zeroes are preserved.
price	Yes	Price for the entire pack.
name	No	Product description.
pack	No	Whole-number quantity per pack; defaults to 1 when unmapped.
currency	No	Currency code; defaults to the top-level currency when unmapped.
unit	No	Base unit; defaults to the top-level unit when unmapped.

Top-level defaults are EUR and item. Blank values in mapped columns are reviewed rather than silently replaced with defaults. Input files may have different column names and separators.

Report statuses

increased, decreased, unchanged, repacked, new, missing, and review. The JSON report contains sourceRows, summary, and rows; the CSV includes all report rows. A missing product means absent from this update, not confirmed discontinued.

Limits and interpretation

• Maximum 2 MiB and 10,000 data rows per catalog; maximum 8 MiB per output report.
• Exact, case-sensitive product-code matching after trimming surrounding spaces. No fuzzy matching.
• Non-negative prices, up to four decimal places, without currency symbols or thousands separators.
• Whole-number pack quantities from 1 to 999999. Unit-price display uses up to six decimals.
• No currency conversion, unit conversion or tax conversion. Both files must use the same tax basis.
• CSV/TSV only; no native Excel, PDF or image parsing.
• Formula-leading values in CSV output are protected as text. Review flagged rows before importing results into another system.

Data and pricing

Your input and reports are stored in your Apify run storage under Apify's retention and access settings. This is cloud processing, not local-only processing. Only submit catalogs you are authorized to process. No catalog contents are written to the application log or sent to AI providers.

The configured price is USD 1 per completed comparison, covering both catalogs and both report files, with platform usage included. This is one charge for the whole comparison, not one charge per product. There is no startup charge or AI API fee. Consult the current Pricing tab before running and set the maximum run cost to at least USD 1.

Reports are saved before the single chargeable summary entry is written. Invalid inputs do not create that entry. If a run fails during the final write, inspect its dataset and saved reports before starting another run: a network interruption can occur after a write has reached Apify. Resurrecting a run with an existing summary is refused to avoid a duplicate charge. A new run is a new comparison and can be charged again.

Support

Open an issue on this Actor's Issues tab with the error message and a small fictional example. Do not post confidential catalogs, credentials or personal data in public issues.