Catalog transformation tool update

This article covers four recent updates to Syncle: a redesigned interface, a new export option for form-style Excel templates, the ability to create and update catalogs directly from PDF files, and improved handling of dropdown lists in retailer templates.

We've simplified the main navigation to reduce the number of steps needed to get things done.

The platform previously spread catalog management across four separate screens. Those are now consolidated into two. Your recipient list appears directly alongside your catalog, and clicking a recipient opens the mapping interface inline, so you no longer need to navigate back and forth between separate pages.

Mappings are set up automatically once a recipient template is uploaded. When you have multiple catalogs, you'll be prompted to confirm which catalogs the connections apply to.

Some retailers require product data submitted as individual Excel files with a fixed, form-like layout rather than a standard tabular spreadsheet.

Syncle can now fill these in for you: select your products, choose the retailer's template, and download a correctly formatted file per product, packaged as a zip archive for convenience.

The export preserves the exact layout, formulas, and visual formatting of the retailer's template, so the files are ready to submit without additional editing.

This feature is available for retailers where a form-style template has been configured in your account. If you need a template set up for a specific retailer, contact your account manager or reach out to Syncle support.

If your product information lives in PDFs such as sell sheets, spec sheets, or brochures, you can now upload those files directly into Syncle to create a new catalog or enrich an existing one.

Upload one or more PDFs and choose whether you want to create a new catalog or add the data to an existing one. Syncle extracts the product information and takes you to a review screen where you can see all detected fields and the actual data pulled from the files. If the result doesn't look right, you can provide additional instructions to re-parse according to your preference before committing the import to a catalog. When adding to an existing catalog, fields are mapped automatically where possible based on the structure of your existing catalog.

When adding to an existing catalog, if any products in the PDF match products already in your catalog (matched by product code or GTIN/EAN), you'll be prompted to choose whether to update those records or skip them.

Syncle is designed to extract product titles and product codes with high accuracy across supported PDF types. Scanned documents are not supported at this time. If a scanned file is detected, you'll receive a clear notification. Image-only or very low-quality PDFs may also produce incomplete results. If a file cannot be processed, you'll see a clear message indicating which file failed and why.

For PDFs used to enrich an existing catalog, Syncle looks for a product identifier in the file to match incoming data against your existing products. This can be a Model Code, GTIN, or SKU depending on the context. This is important to ensure data is added to the right product rather than creating duplicates. If no matching identifier is found, the data from that product will not be saved, so it's worth making sure your PDFs include one of these fields before importing.

Support for additional PDF types and edge cases will continue to improve over time.

Many retailer Excel templates use dropdown lists to restrict what values are accepted in certain fields. For example, a cell might only allow a predefined set of color names, size codes, or category values.

Syncle now recognizes and respects these dropdown constraints when exporting product data. Values are written in a way that matches the options defined in the template, so the file passes retailer validation without manual corrections.

Transformation guidelines also apply to dropdown-constrained fields. By default, exported values will match the accepted options defined in the template. If needed, you can override this behavior using custom instructions, in which case Syncle will follow your instructions regardless of the dropdown restrictions.

If you have questions about any of these features, contact Syncle support at [email protected].