Quick answer
Dealer networks publish price sheets, catalogs, product guides, line cards, rebate forms and regional sales documents that need to stay current without every sales rep and dealer having to learn a new link each quarter.
Where a document genuinely means “the current version”, keep the link and replace the file behind it. Where a dated catalog or historical pricing has to stay available, publish a new item instead.
For a big cycle: upload the batch, map each file by region, product and dealer group, check the ambiguous variants, replace the approved current documents, and test the links dealers and sales teams actually use.
What gets published
Wholesale price sheets, dealer catalogs, line cards, availability lists, rebate forms, promotional guides, regional brochures, installation guides, warranty forms, dealer program documents.
Most of them repeat monthly, quarterly or seasonally, which is what makes the naming corrections worth remembering.
Links that everyone already has
A dealer portal exposes “Current Wholesale Price Sheet” or “Latest Product Catalog”.
Those are natural replacements, because the link is already in email, in the CRM, on the dealer portal, on a printed sales sheet, behind a QR code and in a hundred people’s bookmarks.
Changing that URL every quarter creates work for everyone downstream and nothing for anyone.
Historical pricing is different
Businesses often need previous price sheets for quoting history, contract disputes, audits, customer service and internal reference.
If that applies to you, do not overwrite them.
The usual arrangement is one stable current link plus a separate archive. Undo is not that archive — it is there for when you publish the wrong file.
Region, currency and dealer tier
Distributor files differ by region, dealer tier, currency, language, brand and product family:
dealer-pricing-usd.pdfdealer-pricing-cad.pdfwest-region-catalog.pdfpremium-dealer-rebate.pdf
All of those dimensions stay part of where the file is going. A generic “price sheet” match publishes Canadian pricing to US dealers and looks completely successful doing it.
Example: a quarterly channel refresh
A distributor receives:
- 8 regional price sheets
- 4 dealer-tier catalogs
- 6 rebate and program documents
- 12 revised product guides
- 3 new dealer documents.
A safe run: upload all 33, map them by region, tier and document type, check the renamed programs, mark the 3 new ones as new, look at any shared product guides, replace the approved current files, publish the new documents, and verify the dealer-facing URLs and the cache.
Test the links people actually use
Sales documents live outside your website.
After replacing, test the direct URL, a sample of dealer pages, the links in recent email templates if you can get them, and any QR codes or printed material.
A stable link does not help at all if your CDN is still serving last quarter’s prices.
Shared catalogs
One catalog may serve several dealer pages.
That is usually deliberate. Before replacing it, confirm every one of those pages should get the new edition — because every one of them will.
What this is not
WP Bulk Replace does not calculate prices, manage dealer contracts, enforce customer-specific pricing or validate product data.
It replaces files.
Effective dates
Price lists usually have a future effective date.
Uploading the new sheet early and publishing it immediately is just as wrong as uploading the wrong file — and much harder to spot, because everything about it looks correct.
Nothing in the file tells the plugin when the prices start. That timing belongs to your commercial process.
Dealer tiers
Some portals show different documents depending on which tier a dealer logs in as.
Whatever controls that carries on controlling it. But the tier still needs to be visible while you are mapping, because “the price sheet” is four different documents.
Old links after a deliberate change
Pricing links get forwarded endlessly.
If you do decide to change a document’s address, check the old URL afterwards and put a redirect in place rather than leaving a trail of 404s in people’s inboxes.
Summary
Distributor documents are a strong recurring case, because the external links and the audience variants both matter.
Current document → replace it in place. Historical pricing or catalog → archive it separately. Region, tier or currency variant → map it explicitly.
Related: Price list and catalog updates · Manufacturer documents · PDF linked from email