A Pet Specialty Retailer Builds a Repeatable SFTP Path Off 200 Emailed Vendor Connections With Files.com

A Canadian pet specialty retailer runs a chain of stores selling pet food and supplies. The group runs every store itself, ships nationally through e-commerce, and moves its merchandise through an automated distribution centre. One IT group supports the whole chain.

A retail operation of that shape runs on vendor data. The retailer does not manufacture most of what it sells; hundreds of suppliers do, and each of those relationships produces a steady exchange of inventory and order files that have to reach the ERP and the e-commerce platform for shelves and web listings to stay accurate. How those files travel is not a side detail. It is how a supplier's warehouse and a store agree on what exists.

Roughly 200 Vendor Connections Ran Through an Inbox

Only a handful of partners exchanged files with the retailer over automated connections. The rest, roughly 200 vendor and partner connections, sent their inventory and order files as email attachments, directly to the retailer's team.

Every one of those files cost a pair of hands. Someone received the attachment, pulled it out of the inbox, and routed it into the right system. The work itself was small; the structure was the problem. Each vendor relationship was a standing manual exception, adding a vendor meant adding another one, and the number of partner connections the business could support was capped by how much handling the team could absorb.

The model survived because email is the one channel every vendor already has. The retailer's suppliers are independent outside companies of every size, and the traditional alternative, a bespoke automated connection built per partner, is exactly the kind of project that keeps a vendor on email for years. It stopped being survivable when the retailer set out to make automated exchange the rule rather than the exception. The systems team concluded that carrying manual handling to hundreds of partners was unworkable, and that retrofitting hundreds of live connections after the fact would be worse than getting the design right first.

What the replacement had to do was clear before any product entered the picture. It had to give each vendor a drop point reachable with tools the vendor already owns, and it had to wall every vendor off from every other. It could hand no administrative rights to anyone outside the company. It had to deliver arriving files into the retailer's systems, including on-premises Windows servers, with no person in the loop. And it had to repeat identically for the next vendor, and the next. The retailer selected Files.com as that partner exchange layer.

Under the old model, every automated partner connection was a project. Under this one, it is provisioning.

One Scoped SFTP Account Per Vendor, Automation on the Other Side

For each partner in the initial rollout, the retailer stood up a dedicated folder on its Files.com site and a system account that belonged to that vendor alone. The account connected over SFTP only, and Files.com folder permissions confined it to read-write access inside its own folder. To the vendor, the connection was nothing exotic: any standard SFTP client, one folder, drop the file.

On the other side of the folder, the retailer used the Files.com REST API to collect new files and feed them into the ERP and e-commerce platforms. For e-commerce and web integration work that ran on Windows file servers, the Files.com on-premise Agent pulled files down for local processing. The Agent connected outbound, so bridging the cloud to those servers opened no inbound path through the firewall.

The retailer began the rollout deliberately, proving the design with a small set of live partner connections before expanding it across the vendor base one partner at a time.

For Onboarded Vendors, the Manual Workflow Is Gone

With the pattern in production for its initial suppliers, the retailer has replaced their manual email workflow with a repeatable onboarding operation.

• Inventory and order files from onboarded suppliers land in the vendor's own folder and flow into the retailer's systems with nobody handling an attachment.
• Every outside vendor's access is confined by construction: SFTP only, inside its own folder, with no administrative rights anywhere on the site.
• Converting the next vendor off email is a folder and a scoped credential. The pattern stamps out identically, with no new exception for the team to carry.

That last point is the one that changes the business. As the rollout continues, the same provisioning operation can carry the retailer from its fifth vendor to its fiftieth, turning a vendor base measured in the hundreds from a wall into a list to work through.

One Pattern Instead of Two Hundred Exceptions

A vendor file used to mean an inbox and a pair of hands. Today, when a supplier joins the pattern, its files stop passing through a person at all: they arrive in a folder that belongs to that vendor alone, get collected on a schedule, and reach the ERP without anyone on the retailer's team touching them.

The portable lesson is in how the retailer got there. Moving vendor exchange off email did not require a big-bang conversion of two hundred relationships at once. Files.com let the retailer prove a scoped, per-partner pattern with live suppliers and then apply it one vendor at a time, so what looked like a migration problem became an onboarding routine.