Compare distributor price lists at catalog scale

Why large catalogs are hard to track by hand

A one-off RFQ with a dozen line items can be checked by eye. A distributor catalog with hundreds or thousands of SKUs across many categories can't — and that's exactly the kind of file a distributor like a large industrial or MRO supplier typically sends (context for scale, not a claim about any specific distributor relationship).

• A distributor catalog this size — fasteners, electrical, safety, abrasives, plumbing, MRO consumables — runs to hundreds or thousands of lines, so a handful of real increases hide easily among rows that didn't change.
• Catalogs get re-issued often. Each new price round means redoing the same comparison, and a spreadsheet formula built for one file size tends to silently break, or silently miss rows, the next time the row count shifts.
• The same item can shift row position, get a new internal code, or have its description reworded between catalog versions — a plain row-by-row diff misses all three.

Try it with a sample 160-line catalog

A fictional catalog covering fasteners, electrical, safety, abrasives, plumbing, tools, MRO consumables, and packaging — 160 lines, the kind of spread a real distributor catalog runs across. Download it and drop it straight into a comparison, or use it to see the column structure CostRift expects before mapping your own file.

Old vs. new: what changed in a re-issued catalog

When a distributor re-issues its catalog, Price Change compares it against the previous version and flags every item that went up, went down, was added, or was dropped — plus the margin impact per item if you map your selling price. The comparison runs the same way whether the file has 12 lines or well over a thousand.

For the decision that follows a real increase, see supplier price increase.

Several distributors, one scope: catalog vs. catalog

Sourcing the same scope of items from two or three distributors means lining up two or three large catalogs with different layouts and item codes. Supplier Comparison does that matching and shows the cheapest distributor per item and how much of the scope each one actually covers. See comparing supplier quotes for the one-off, smaller-scale version of this same workflow, or supplier price list import for getting a messy catalog file into clean, mappable columns first. Comparing auto parts specifically? Compare auto parts supplier prices. Comparing packaging consumables? compare packaging distributor prices.

How each item is classified

Increased / Decreased

The item is present in both catalogs and its cost moved — with the absolute and percentage change.

Unchanged

The item is present in both catalogs at the same cost.

New / Removed

The item appears in only one of the two catalogs.

Needs review

A duplicate or ambiguous SKU in one catalog — left flagged rather than matched by a guess.

Currency or unit mismatch

Comparable rows priced in a different currency or unit of measure — flagged rather than silently compared.

What this isn't

CostRift matches items by SKU and flags what it can't resolve safely — it has no catalog database, no distributor integrations, and no semantic or AI-based matching that guesses two different descriptions are the same item. It doesn't estimate a price benchmark against the wider market either; every number comes from the files you add. For a messy source file — shifted headers, merged sheets, inconsistent SKUs — see supplier price list comparison for how the matching itself works in detail.

Frequently asked questions