Move supplier email details into an inventory sheet
An automated email workflow turned supplier messages into spreadsheet updates for a small e-commerce store.
- What they did
- A developer made a private system for a friend’s small online shop. It scanned incoming supplier mail, used OpenAI’s o3-mini and o1-mini to pull out the needed inventory fields and tidy them up, then exported the results to CSV before loading them into Google Sheets. The owner had been entering everything manually, and the same setup was later offered to other businesses with continued upkeep.
- How it went
- They said customers were saving several hours every week, keeping track of stock more easily, and generating over $2,000 in revenue. The pricing mentioned was $200 to launch it and $50 each month after that. The biggest issue they pointed to was making the service scale without becoming difficult to support.
- Tips
- Limit the inbox sources so the workflow only reads trusted supplier messages, and send anything uncertain to a manual check. If you plan to reuse it for clients, build in a clear upkeep step from the start.
Try it yourself with n8n
Create an automation for [email inbox] that watches for messages from [supplier names or labels]. For each one, pull out [field 1], [field 2], [field 3], [field 4], and [field 5], then add or update the correct row in [Google Sheet name]. If the message is incomplete, unclear, or hard to map, stop and flag it for human review instead of filling in guesses. Run a test message first, then wait for my approval before any live write, overwrite, send, submit, or delete action.
Fill in the [brackets]. Agents can make mistakes, so review anything before it is sent, paid or deleted.
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