Retail & Distribution
Bringing 200,000+ SKUs Together From Every Supplier
Vantage Group Digital built and runs the commerce system behind Rare Records, a music and vinyl business that sources from distributors worldwide. We built software that ingests each supplier's data and turns raw product metadata into clean, searchable values, then consolidated more than 200,000 titles into one fast store, so their staff and customers can actually find anything in the range.
200,000+ SKUs consolidated
200,000+
SKUS under management
50+
Supplier feeds ingested automatically
13
Metdata Values per SKU
Rare Records can source an enormous range of music and vinyl, but that range lives across many distributors, each supplying its data in its own format, with its own fields, and its own idea of how a product should be described. The scale wasn't the problem. Making it usable was.
Supplier feeds arrive as raw, inconsistent data. One distributor's "format" is another's "media type." Genres, artists, labels, pressings and conditions are all described differently, or not at all. Dumped straight into a store, hundreds of thousands of titles like that are unsearchable: staff can't find what a customer is asking for, and customers can't find what they came for. A catalogue you can't search is a catalogue you can't sell.
The problem wasn't what Rare Records could get hold of. It was turning a pile of mismatched supplier data into one catalogue anyone could actually navigate.
We built the store on Shopify, with the full catalogue living natively in it so it stays fast and searchable at scale, even across hundreds of thousands of titles.
First, the ingestion software. We built a system that pulls in each supplier's feed and reads it whatever shape it arrives in. It takes raw product metadata, the loose, inconsistent fields buried in supplier data, and turns it into clean, structured, searchable values: consistent formats, genres, artists, labels and attributes, mapped to one shared standard across every source.
That turns a stitched-together list into a real catalogue. The same title from two suppliers is recognised as the same title. Every product carries the attributes a buyer would actually search on, so both staff and customers can find things by what they mean, not by hoping a supplier happened to type it the same way.
Then the pipeline behind it. Because stock sits across several suppliers, the system knows where each title comes from and can route and split orders to the right supplier, with received stock consolidated and shipped by Rare Records. One searchable catalogue at the front, many suppliers behind it, and the join handled automatically.
The rollout
A catalogue this size is only worth building if it stays usable, so it isn't built and left.
New supplier data is ingested and enriched continuously, new releases and back catalogue flow in, and pricing stays current, so the store stays accurate and searchable as the catalogue and the supplier mix change. That's the ongoing half of the service: Rare Records gets one clean, current, searchable view of everything they can source, without maintaining it by hand across a dozen feeds.
The same system that ingests messy supplier data and turns 200,000+ titles into a searchable catalogue is the system behind every Vantage build. The scale changes, the process doesn't.