A supplier email lands: 6% on everything from the 1st. Now several hundred SKUs need new trade prices across every tier, and how long that takes — and how many silent errors it plants — depends entirely on your tooling. There are two sane ways to do a bulk price update against Linnworks: a CSV round-trip through Excel, or direct editing in a spreadsheet-style grid with bulk maths. Each has a place; each has failure modes worth knowing cold.
The CSV round-trip: powerful, portable, booby-trapped
The round-trip is familiar: export your catalogue and current prices to CSV, open it in Excel, work your magic, import it back. Its strengths are real. Excel handles genuinely gnarly logic — supplier-specific uplifts via lookup tables, margin floors, conditional rules per category — better than any purpose-built grid. The file is also a natural audit artefact: keep the before and after CSVs and you have a permanent record of the reprice. And it's delegable — you can email the file to whoever owns pricing and import the result.
Where Excel silently breaks pricing files
The trouble is that Excel doesn't just open CSVs — it reinterprets them, and with product data its guesses are corrosive:
- SKU mangling. Numeric-looking SKUs lose leading zeros (00451 becomes 451), and long numeric codes get flattened to scientific notation — 8712345678901 becomes 8.71235E+12. Re-import that file and those rows silently fail to match, or worse, match wrongly.
- Date conversion. Anything shaped like a date gets converted: a SKU or size code like 1-4-22 becomes a date serial. Excel does this on open, before you touch anything.
- Trailing-zero and rounding drift. 12.50 displays as 12.5; a currency-formatted column can round what's stored versus what's shown. The file you save is not quite the file you saw.
- Locale and encoding traps. A comma decimal separator, a stray thousands separator, or a re-save that switches encoding and quoting — any of these can shift columns or corrupt values, and none of them announce themselves.
The vicious part is the silence. A formula error shows a wrong number you might spot; a mangled SKU column shows a perfectly plausible file that simply stops matching your catalogue. You find out when a trade customer is charged the wrong price, weeks later.
The grid: fast, safe, and honest about what it can't do
The alternative is editing prices in a purpose-built, spreadsheet-style grid that talks to Linnworks directly — the model our upcoming B2B Price Tiers app uses. You get inline editing with the keyboard feel of a spreadsheet, but the data never leaves a typed, validated environment: SKUs are identifiers, prices are prices, and nothing is "helpfully" converted en route.
For the supplier-uplift scenario, bulk maths does in one operation what the CSV route does in six steps: select the affected rows, apply +6% (or a fixed amount, or a formula change), review, done. Because tiers are formula-driven — cost-plus upwards or RRP-discount downwards, as covered in wholesale price list formulas — a cost change can cascade through every tier automatically, with attractive rounding to .99, .95 or .49 applied at the end rather than hand-fudged. The finished prices push back to Linnworks as native extended properties on each stock item (why that storage choice matters is a whole subject: see tier prices as Linnworks extended properties).
What a grid is honestly worse at: genuinely bespoke multi-source logic. If the reprice needs a three-way join between a supplier file, a freight surcharge table and last quarter's sales ranks, Excel remains the right scratchpad.
A decision rule that holds up
- Uniform or rule-based changes (percentage uplifts, category-wide adjustments, formula tweaks): use the grid with bulk maths. Faster, and structurally incapable of the SKU-mangling class of error.
- Complex one-off restructures (external data joins, modelling in pivot tables): build it in Excel — but round-trip through a proper CSV import/export, not copy-paste.
- Everything in between: prefer the grid, and keep CSV export as your audit trail rather than your editing surface.
If you must round-trip, do it safely
- Import the CSV via Excel's data-import flow with the SKU column explicitly set to Text — never just double-click the file open.
- Touch only the price columns; leave identifiers untouched.
- Spot-check five known SKUs after re-import, including at least one with a leading zero or a long numeric code.
- Keep the pre-change export. When something looks odd in a month, you'll want the before picture.
B2B Price Tiers is built for exactly this workflow and is coming very soon: unlimited named tiers, the formula engine, grid editing with bulk maths, and CSV import and export so the Excel round-trip stays available when you genuinely need it — syncing with Linnworks in both directions. It will be £29.99/month with a 14-day free trial when live; details at the product site, b2b-prices.mcp-g.com. If your current process is a master spreadsheet held together with hope, tiered pricing without spreadsheets is the companion read.
Next time costs move, reprice every tier in minutes instead of an afternoon — register your interest in B2B Price Tiers at mcp-g.com/apps/b2b-price-tiers and be first in when it launches.