Wholesale price list with photos: how to build one in Excel

aiprice blog · practical notes for suppliers

"Send us a price list with photos" — you hear it from small shops and from the buying departments of large chains alike; some retailers write it straight into their supplier requirements. The logic is simple: without a photo the product does not exist. A buyer will not google every SKU — they choose with their eyes.

So let's be practical: how to build a price list with photos in Excel properly, where the traps are, and what to do when the file outgrows itself.

How to insert photos so they never drift

The classic failure of photo price lists: you open the file and the images have slid onto neighbouring rows or piled on top of each other. To avoid it:

1. Put the picture in the cell, not on top of it. Recent Excel versions have "Place in Cell" (Insert → Picture → Place in Cell) — the image then belongs to the row, and sorting or filtering will not break it.
2. On older versions: right-click the image → Format Picture → Properties → "Move and size with cells". This one checkbox matters more than everything else on this page.
3. One size for every photo. Set a row height (90 px works well) and fit the images to it — the list looks tidy instead of like a collage.
4. Resize before inserting to roughly 300–500 px on the long side. A 4000 px phone photo adds nothing to a price list and weighs fifty times more.

The traps everyone hits

• The file balloons. Two or three hundred products with photos and the file is already 30–80 MB: email rejects it, messengers crawl, and the buyer's phone takes a minute to open it. We went through exactly this with our own price lists.
• On a phone the photos are barely visible. Columns squeeze, images shrink to thumbnails — and the buyer asks for a bigger photo anyway.
• Updating becomes punishment. Adding twenty new products with photos is an hour of manual work; reordering rows is a prayer that nothing drifts.
• PDF doesn't save you — it holds its layout, but it has no usable phone search and no cart, so orders are still dictated by voice.

The file is not the finish line

A photo price list built the way described above is already the raw material for the next step: an interactive catalog behind a link. For the buyer the difference is dramatic:

• opens on any phone in a second — no download;
• every photo is full size, with search and categories;
• the buyer fills a cart under your rules (minimum order, case packs);
• the order arrives in your inbox as a clean spreadsheet, ready for ERP import;
• you update the price list and the link always shows the current version.

And the part that matters most if your photos already sit in cells: aiprice extracts images straight from the Excel file — nothing to export or rename. You send the file as it is and get a catalog link within 24 hours. The first one is free.

The short version

1. Photos go in the cell (or tick "move and size with cells")
2. 300–500 px, one format across the whole list
3. A file over 20 MB is a signal to change the delivery channel
4. Customers get a link; Excel stays your working file

Read next: Excel price list to online catalog: 3 ways · 7 things a wholesale catalog needs