Full brand ownership. Free distribution.
If you're a brand, manufacturer, or importer with high-quality product data, you get full ownership of your brand inside PowersportOS. Portal access to manage parts, fitments, brand metadata, and updates yourself. In exchange, your data flows to every retailer in our network who subscribes to your brand. No portal fee, no per-SKU fee. The Data provider tier is live today; CSV upload and direct API ingest paths work from day one, and we build per-provider adapters for XML, REST, or proprietary feeds when a relationship calls for it.
Why this exists
Quality data is the foundation of the platform.
A central catalog is only useful if the data inside it is trustworthy. Retailers across our network rely on PowersportOS for submodel-precise fitments, real photography, accurate cross-references, and current SKU lists. When that data is good, retailers sell more, and the brands behind it sell more, by virtue of being more findable, more correctly fitted, and more confidently displayed.
We could pay for that data, but every euro spent on data acquisition is a euro the platform can't spend on building tools. So we made it free for contributors instead. You give us good data, we give you distribution.
How it works in practice
Live today. Not a future-roadmap pitch.
Data provider is a real tier on the platform today, with the portal surfaces, ingest paths, and brand-permission model wired up. Here is what the operator experience actually looks like, end to end.
Admin grants brand permission
After the application is accepted, PowersportOS staff create a Data provider tenant for your company and grant brand permissions per brand you own or represent. Roles range from READ (review-only) to WRITE (create and edit parts) to OWNER (also edits Brand metadata, logo, country, website). Every grant and every subsequent write is audit-logged with tenant identity attached.
Stripped-down portal
Your portal at app.powersportos.com shows a focused sidebar: Dashboard, Brands, Parts, Import, Settings, Help. No storefront features, no dealer map, no Shopify integration on this tier. The Brands surface lists every brand you have permission on with a role badge. The Parts surface lists central catalog parts scoped to those brands, with lifecycle controls, replaced-by pointers, and full PIM data inline.
Pick your ingest path
Three options, all writing to the same central catalog with the same brand-permission gate. CSV upload via the portal works from day one with a downloadable template. Direct JSON API works for tenants who want to stream updates from their existing system on a schedule, via /api/app/managed-parts with the tenant's X-API-Key. Per-provider adapters (XML, REST, FTP, proprietary feeds) are built per relationship when neither CSV nor JSON fits; roughly one to two weeks per source after the technical conversation with you. See Data ingest for the architecture.
We handle the normalisation
Your data shape doesn't have to match ours. We normalise country of origin to ISO 3166-1 codes, validate HS codes, sanitise HTML descriptions, expand year-range syntax into individual Fitment rows, mirror your images and manuals to our object storage, and apply the brand-permission gate per row. Rows we can't process land in a per-row error report rather than blocking the batch. Retailers downstream consume one normalised data shape regardless of which provider it came from.
Lifecycle instead of delete
You can deprecate a part with a successor pointer (replacedById) when an SKU is going away. Retailers who have the part activated keep their activation rows; the storefront shows a "Replaced by X" hint and links to the new SKU. Hard-deleting a part is blocked once retailers have activated it, the cascade would destroy their data. Newly-created parts with no activations can still be deleted to clean up typos.
Free upgrade path to paid tiers
A Data provider that later wants to run their own storefront, get the "find this part at a reseller nearby" widget, or see network stock visibility can request an upgrade to Manufacturer or Distributor from inside the portal. Your brand permissions and curated data follow you through the upgrade unchanged. The flip is bi-directional, a paid Manufacturer that wants to stop running a storefront but keep maintaining their data can be downgraded back to Data provider.
Channel Communications included
Reach the dealer network without upgrading.
Data Provider isn't just catalog data ingest. You also get full access to Channel Communications: publish blog posts, product releases, operational alerts, and safety recalls to every retailer in the network who subscribes to your brand. One channel, the right urgency per message kind, routed through the brand-subscription graph that already exists.
Continuous value, not one-shot ingest
Catalog ingest is the foundation of your relationship with the network. Channel Communications is the continuous-every-week layer on top. New range announcement, technical bulletin, sales-stop, MSRP change, safety recall: publish once in your Data Provider portal, every subscribed retailer either approves in their inbox or lands it directly on their Shopify blog (per their subscription preference).
Safety recalls with audit trail
Force-delivered to every subscribed retailer regardless of their mute / category / queue settings. Persistent red banner across their portal plus parallel email to their technical contact until an owner or admin acknowledges. 48-hour SLA per the Channel Subscriber Terms. Acknowledgements record user, role, IP, user agent, timestamp, exactly the evidence a regulatory inquiry would ask for.
Click-through Channel Author Terms apply (owner or admin accepts on behalf of the tenant at the current version). DSA Article 6 hosting service classification: PowersportOS routes the content but does not endorse, edit, rank, or curate it. Architecture details
The exchange
What flows in each direction.
High-quality catalog data
Your SKUs with full structured metadata: brand, part number, sanitised-HTML description, category (mapped into our shared tree), one or many OEM cross-references with optional cross-brand attribution, weight + L×W×H dimensions, EAN, country of origin, multi-image product galleries, manuals. Most importantly: submodel-precise fitments, the level of detail that distinguishes "fits Outlander 1000" from "fits Outlander 1000 X-MR 2023–2026". Each fitment row can carry side / axle position (LH, RH, front, rear) and a free-text caveat when the fit needs qualification.
Ongoing data hygiene
New SKUs added to your range. End-of-life SKUs flagged as such. Fitment corrections when you discover errors or expand model coverage. Updated imagery and descriptions when you refresh your brand. Reasonable response time when our team flags a data-quality issue or asks for clarification.
Redistribution licence
A non-exclusive licence for PowersportOS to redistribute your catalog data to subscribing retailers. The data passes through to their Shopify stores, displayed alongside their own pricing and stock. Your brand attribution is preserved at every step. You retain ownership of the data and can withdraw the licence with notice.
Portal access + free distribution
You get a PowersportOS portal login to manage your brand directly: upload SKUs, edit metadata, update fitments, swap images, mark EOL parts. Your brand is listed in our central catalog, and every retailer in the network who subscribes to your brand gets your data flowing to their Shopify automatically. Basic brand-info display (logo, country of origin, website) makes you visible across the network. A direct contact on our side handles data-quality dialogue and brand questions.
Basic usage reporting Coming
How many retailers subscribe to your brand. Which countries they cover. Volume signals where appropriate. The basic "is this paying off?" view, free at the Data Provider tier. Detailed sales-channel reporting and active network analytics are part of the paid Manufacturer tier (see comparison below).
We don't compete with you
PowersportOS is plumbing, not marketplace. We don't sell parts, we don't take commission on retailer sales made through your catalog data, we don't run our own e-commerce store with your range underneath. We don't sell aggregated insights to your competitors. We don't surface paid placements that override your brand in retailer search results. Your data builds the network; the network builds the platform. Symbiotic, not extractive.
Data quality requirements
What "good data" means here.
We evaluate every brand application against the same data-quality bar. The bar isn't an arbitrary checklist. Every item below maps to a real retailer or end-customer experience.
Submodel-precise fitments with optional position + notes
Outlander 1000 X-MR and Outlander 1000 XT are different vehicles with different fitment realities. We don't accept fitment data at the model-only level. It would force retailers to either reject the brand or sell wrong-part returns into their customer base. Year ranges and chassis codes welcome where they apply. Each fitment row can carry a position attribute (LH, RH, front, rear, or four-corner variants) for parts that come in mirrored or stacked variants, and a free-text notes field for caveats like "fits with electric start" or "before VIN 12345" that surface on the storefront product page.
Real product photography, with room for a gallery
Minimum 800×800 pixel images, photographed on a clean background or at a recognisable real-world angle. No phone-snapshot-on-the-warehouse-floor. No watermarked stock photos. Each part supports a full multi-image gallery (primary plus additional angles) with per-image alt text for accessibility and SEO. Customer's confidence in your part starts with the image they see.
Rich-HTML descriptions in English or Swedish
Full sentences, not bullet-point fragments lifted from a spec sheet. Material composition, fitment intent, key dimensions where they matter. Descriptions accept sanitised HTML (paragraphs, headings, lists, emphasis, inline code for part numbers, links), so the storefront product page renders properly typeset copy. Plain-text descriptions also work, they get wrapped in paragraphs automatically at import. We can host multi-language descriptions if you maintain them, with English or Swedish at minimum.
OEM cross-references, one or many per SKU
If your part replaces an OEM part number, we want that linkage. End customers search by OEM number constantly. Without the cross-reference, the part is functionally invisible to them. A single aftermarket SKU often replaces four or five OEM numbers across model years (and sometimes across vehicle brands when a shared powertrain crosses platforms). The data model stores each cross-reference as its own row with an optional OEM-brand attribution, so cross-platform parts are first-class, not flattened into a single string.
Weight, dimensions, EAN, country of origin
Weight (kg) plus three-axis dimensions (length, width, height in cm) for shipping calculations and fits-in-the-box logistics. EAN barcode for retail POS scanning and label printing. Country of origin (where the part was manufactured, distinct from the brand's country) for customs labelling and regulated marketplaces. Required for any part where these would influence checkout or fulfilment; optional where genuinely irrelevant. We don't fabricate this data; if you don't have it, leave it blank rather than guess.
Category mapped into the shared tree
Categories aren't free-text strings; they live in a curated powersport-specific tree (Engine, Drivetrain, Suspension, Body & Plastics, Apparel & Gear, etc.) with two levels of nesting by default. Mapping each SKU to a tree node makes storefront filters work consistently across the network, supports SEO landing pages, and keeps adjacent brands organised the same way. We can extend the tree when a range doesn't fit cleanly.
Manuals and installation docs where relevant
Optional but valuable. End customers buying through a retailer's Shopify benefit enormously from having the manual one click away. Hosting cost is ours, attribution stays yours.
What this is not
The line between Data Provider and Manufacturer tier.
Data Provider is intentionally narrow. If you want active platform features (analytics, the "find this part nearby" widget on your own Shopify, dealer-linking, network stock visibility) that's the paid Manufacturer track. The two are designed to coexist; many brands start as Data Providers and upgrade later when they want to do something with the network rather than just be in it.
What you don't get
- · "Find this part at a reseller nearby" widget for your own Shopify product pages
- · Network stock-visibility (which retailers stock what, where)
- · Reseller-network query API
- · Dealer-linking to manage which resellers are tied to your brand
- · Detailed sales-channel analytics (basic usage reporting is planned for the free tier; full analytics is Manufacturer-only)
You do get portal access. That's how you maintain your own brand data. The difference vs Manufacturer is the active-platform features above, not the back-end tooling.
What that track adds
Same portal access, same data ownership, plus the active platform features that turn the network into a sales channel. "Find this part at a reseller near you" widget on your own Shopify. Reseller-network query API. Dealer-linking and network stock visibility. Full sales-channel analytics. HYBRID mode at no extra cost if you also sell direct. Same data-distribution mechanics as Data Provider, but now you can drive demand to your dealer network and see where your range is selling.
How to apply
Application is curated.
Because data quality is the basis of the partnership, we evaluate every brand application before accepting it into the central catalog. We're not gatekeeping (most brands with clean data pass) but we owe our retailers a baseline.
- Reach out. Email info@powersportos.com with your brand name and a brief description of your range.
- Send a data sample. Typically 50–100 representative SKUs with the metadata you'd contribute to the catalog. CSV, JSON, or an existing PIM export all work.
- Quality review. We evaluate against the requirements above, flag any gaps, and ask clarifying questions. Most reviews complete within 2 weeks.
- Partnership agreement. Short, straightforward, non-exclusive. Defines the licence, your maintenance commitment, and the withdrawal terms.
- Tenant + brand permissions. We create your Data provider tenant in the admin portal and grant WRITE or OWNER permission on each brand you own. The grant + every subsequent change is audit-logged.
- Portal access + initial ingest. You get a portal login at
app.powersportos.com. Initial catalog goes in via whichever path fits: CSV upload through the Parts page, direct API push from your existing system, or a one-time clean ingest we run from a source you provide. If you need a per-provider adapter for a non-CSV / non-JSON format, we scope and build it before launch. We notify retailers in the network who've expressed interest in your brand. From there, future updates are yours to push.
Want to be a Data Provider?
Brands with good data and an interest in network distribution are exactly the partners we're built around. Send us a note and we'll start the conversation.