The Supplier Core Software allows you to manage your product individually, via spreadsheet, or through integrations.
Since MainStem's goal is to provide an accurate marketplace experience for the customers, we have asked and provided the tools for you to manage products in helping MainStem achieve that goal. The big focus in creating an accurate marketplace is making sure that products are correctly marked in/out of stock and that pricing is correct.
There are a few ways to manage products through the software, those are manually, bulk uploads, or integration. Everything from your price, SKU, sizing, menu, photos can all be edited or managed once that information is in the system.
Manually Managing Products
To start managing your products visit the Products page by hitting the link on the left side navigation pane. From here you will get to the Product Management screen. There are filters that can be used to narrow down the view of whatever products you are hoping to adjust. For example, you can use the "Is Out Of Stock" column to show all products currently marked out of stock by typing "TRUE" into that field. All of these columns can also be sorted, so if you know you needed to work on your most expensive priced product, you could click once on the column title "Wholesale" to sort by most expensive items at the top. All of these fields can be used in combination to further narrow down your selection in finding the product you need.
Once you find the product, click into that product to reach the Product Details page. Like I mentioned before, the main pieces of an accurate marketplace are stock levels (availability) and pricing.
To manage the availability of a product, please look at that first card of information. There are two toggle buttons located at the top that allow customers to purchase your product
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- Stock
- Out Of Stock - product has an "Out of Stock" banner on the marketplace AND purchasing is not available
- In Stock - product is available and ready for purchase
- Store
- Show In Store - Product is visible on the marketplace
- Hidden From Store - Product is not visible therefor not purchasable either
- Stock
To manage the pricing of your product, scroll down a little bit to find the cards titled "Product Pricing" and "Enterprise Pricing". Keep in mind you are entering the prices that you would like MainStem to pay you, so any updated costs need to be installed before the next order is processed. Not doing that creates some back and forth between our accounting departments to make sure all invoicing is correct, when the goal is to prevent extra work and have an accurate marketplace offering.
Managing products with spreadsheets
Using a spreadsheet to manage multiple products will increase your efficiency. Rather than clicking into product details of each item you would like to adjust, you can hit the Export To CSV button above the table of products. This will export your products into a CSV file which is ready to be edited in your favorite spreadsheet program like Google Sheets or Excel.
From your spreadsheet the columns we want to edit to manage these products are Show In Store (I), Is Out Of Stock (H), Wholesale (E), and Retail (F). In columns H and I, use a TRUE or FALSE as your entry. Columns E and F do not require the "$", so please only enter raw numbers for those columns.
Once all necessary changes have been made to your spreadsheet, be sure to save your file in the .CSV format.
Managing products with integration
Integrations are nice because you only need to manage your own system. If the integration is set up properly, once you make changes to products in your system those will be reflected in almost real time on the MainStem platform. MainStem syncs its integrations every hour, on the hour meaning updates to your products will be reflected on the marketplace within an hour of you making changes in your own system. You will not need to come to MainStem to manage changes supported by integration.