ONDC Catalog Sync Workflow: Sheets to Seller App API (n8n + OpenAI)

Keep Your ONDC Seller Catalog in Sync—Automatically

This n8n workflow automatically syncs an ONDC seller catalog from your Google Sheets to your Seller App API—on a 30-minute schedule or via webhook—while using OpenAI to clean product content, validate ONDC retail rules, check image links, and email a detailed error report.

What this workflow does

• Runs on schedule or demand: executes every 30 minutes or whenever a POST request hits the n8n webhook endpoint.
• Detects catalog changes: reads catalog rows from the Google Sheets “Catalog” tab and fetches the current live catalog from the Seller App API to identify changed, new, disabled, or drifting SKUs.
• Uses OpenAI for ONDC-ready content: sends only items needing content updates to gpt-4o-mini to normalize titles, descriptions, categories, units, and attributes.
• Validates images: checks product image URLs using HTTP HEAD requests and flags broken links, invalid content types, or oversized image files.
• Applies ONDC retail rule validation: validates each SKU against ONDC retail rules, includes a price-jump guard to hold large changes until the sheet confirms them, then builds batched upsert and inventory payloads.
• Sync + reporting: pushes updates to the Seller App API, writes sync results (including hashes/timestamps and AI-cleaned fields) back to Google Sheets, logs failures into a “Sync Errors” tab, and emails a summary via Gmail.

Use cases

• Automate frequent catalog updates without manual API calls.
• Ensure ONDC-compliant product data with OpenAI-assisted cleanup and rule checks.
• Reduce failed onboarding due to broken/invalid image URLs.
• Provide operators with an error-focused run report after each sync cycle.

Technical details

• n8n workflow nodes: if, set, code, gmail, switch, webhook
• Trigger: scheduled every 30 minutes or POST to the webhook
• AI: OpenAI gpt-4o-mini for content normalization
• Data sources/targets: Google Sheets (“Catalog” tab + “Sync Errors”), Seller App API
• Image verification: HTTP HEAD requests for URL and content validation