Follow one supplier file through a manual sync and count the touches. Someone finds the email or logs into the portal and downloads the CSV. Reformats it, because this supplier calls quantity 'QTY_AVAIL' and ships in cases of 24 while your system counts eaches. Runs the VLOOKUP that maps their SKU codes to yours and patches the ones that miss. Uploads to the inventory system, then pushes to the storefront, then hopes.
The hours are the visible cost. If someone spends the first ninety minutes of every day wrangling supplier files, price that at their loaded rate, then remember it scales with every supplier you add. The invisible cost is worse: the oversell refunded with an apology, the marketplace account dinged for cancellations, the safety buffer padded so wide the storefront says 'out of stock' on product sitting in your warehouse.
None of this is merchandising judgment. Downloading, remapping, and copy-pasting between systems that were never introduced to each other — every step of it can be read, decided, or escalated by software.