Importing & mapping a supplier feed

A feed is the source of truth BackorderPRO uses to update stock, delivery dates and pre-order status. You can add multiple feeds depending on your plan.

Supported formats & sources

File formats: CSV, Excel (.xls and .xlsx) and XML.

Sources:

• Direct URL (a public file link).
• File upload.
• FTP / SFTP — credentials are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM). (Business)
• Browser-rendered feeds for JavaScript-heavy supplier sites. (Business)

Feeds are guarded against anti-bot/HTML responses being mis-parsed as a spreadsheet, and auto-detection helpers can locate a feed URL inside a supplier landing page.

How products are matched

BackorderPRO matches feed rows to your Shopify variants by SKU or EAN/barcode. Matching is tolerant: it trims whitespace and leading zeros and is case-insensitive. A two-tier (in-memory + on-disk) variant cache keeps matching fast and reliable, and large catalogues use the Shopify Bulk Operations API on the Business plan.

Mapping columns

When you add a feed, map your feed columns to the values the app needs:

You can also set buffer days per feed (deliveryDateOffsetDays) — extra days added to the supplier date to cover the supplier → you → customer path.

Scheduling syncs

• Scheduled sync: weekly on Free; once per day on Starter, Growth and Business.
• Manual "Run Now": 1/day on Free, 3/day on Starter, 20/day on Growth and unlimited on Business.
• "Run All" executes every feed plus your global rules in the correct order.

Scheduling runs on an always-on machine, so you do not need any external cron service.

Next steps

• Setting up pre-orders & backorders