The products that you can add to a transaction and sell using MicroBiz POS are contained in your store catalog. This is the set of products that is viewable by default from the Manage Products grid. For certain retail verticals, MicroBiz allow you to access a central depository of 'vendor catalogs', which are generally all the products sold by a specific brand or vendor. You can search this repository of products from different vendor catalogs, and 'pull' products into your store catalog with one click so that the products can be quickly added to register transactions, customer orders, purchase orders and vendor shipments.
The article below steps through the process of connecting your paid subscription to vendor catalogs.
Step One: Create Vendor Records
The first step is to create a Vendor Record in MicroBiz for the vendor that you will want to link to its catalog data. Go to Catalog>Vendors and press the 'Add New' button at the top right.
Be sure to add all relevant information, as the vendor contact information will be used as the contact information on purchase orders and vendor shipments.
Step Two: Create Pricing Rules and optional Rounding Rules
Vendor catalogs usually supply multiple price and cost data for each product - but you will have to decide how to use this data to create a Retail Price for each product. For example, a product may have both a suggested price (MSRP) and a minimum allowable price (MAP) as well as a cost. You need to create a Pricing Rule that will take one of the prices or cost and calculates a retail price for all products in the vendor catalog. For example, you can create a Pricing Rule that will calculate a Retail Price. This could be something simple, such as pricing products at MSRP. Or is can be more complex, such as retail price is cost plus a 35% mark-up, plus $2.00, with the cents rounded to .99.
To do this, open a vendor record and go to Price Rule tab.
When creating a Pricing Rule, here setup fields:
Price Basis - What value should be the rule based on (MSRP, MAP, Cost, Price).
Action - What action should be done on the selected Price Basis (Depending on the Price Basis, the action options can differ).
Action Amount - What amount should be used for the selected action.
Additional Markup - Enter additional $ markup for the action if needed.
Rounding Rules - Select price rounding rule (you can setup one separately if you don't yet have one).
As soon as you enter the information, you will see Test Rule button, which will display a calculated price based on the rule.
If everything you set is correct, click Save & Continue to Save the rule.
Step Three: Link an Available Catalog to the Vendor Record
After creating a vendor record and pricing rule, you can now link an available vendor catalog to the corresponding vendor in MicroBiz. For this purpose, go to Settings->Integration->Vendor Catalog.
From the opened page,
1. Select your vendor catalog by clicking on the line.
2. Enter User Label which will define this catalog. This will appear in the search dropdown.
3. Select the vendor record in MicroBiz that will linked to the corresponding vendor catalog,
4. Click Save.
Step Four: Set Catalog Update Rules
Prices and costs in the vendor catalog are periodically updated by the vendor. The system treats these updates as follows:
• Vendor Stock, future stock, future stock dates – immediate update to linked store catalog data.
• Replacement Cost, Discontinued status – immediate update to linked store catalog data.
• MAP, MSRP – immediate update to linked store catalog data.
• Retail Price/Customer Prices – Price changes in store catalog are based on Vendor Catalog Update settings (see following).
To set up the Vendor Catalog Update Rules, go to Settings>Integrations>Vendor Catalog
There are two update settings on this page.
1) Auto Update Prices:
- If Auto Update Price = Yes - MicroBiz will change prices automatically your store for all affected products in your Store Catalog from this vendor when the vendor pricing basis changes
- If Auto Update Price = No – MicroBiz will not automatically change the prices in your Store Catalog [but will provide an alert to the user so that you can change the price as desired].
Note: Updates to products for additional new size/color variants are not automatic. Users will need to manually update the product from the catalog feed to add new size/color variants.
2) Retain/Display Catalog Changes:
- If Retain/Display Catalog Changes = Yes - MicroBiz will save and display a list of each product with a cost and price change in the Catalog Price Update tab of the Vendor Record (see below). If you have Auto Update Price set to 'Yes' you can use this tab to to review updates made. If you have Auto Update Price set to 'No', you can use this tab to manually apply all or select price updates.
- If Retain/Display Catalog Changes = No – MicroBiz will not retain or display the products with price or cost changes on the Catalog Price Update tab in the Vendor record.
Step Five: Pull Products from Vendor Catalogs into or Link Product
Once you have linked a vendor record to an shared vendor catalog, you can now pull products from a vendor catalog into Store Catalog with one click.
This can be done from the following screens by clicking on the Sore Catalog Search button to the right of the product search bar.
- Front Register screen
- Customer Order record
- Purchase Order record
- Vendor Shipment record
As an example, to do this from a Vendor Shipment record, follow the below steps:
1. Create a new Vendor Shipment
2. Select the Vendor and select Catalog Search.
2. From the Opened page select the needed Vendor Catalog
4. Search for products by sku, style, name, UPC, select item.
* The orange circle near the checkbox shows that the item is already pulled to your instance
*The grey circle near the checkbox shows that the item is not pulled to your instance.
5. From the opened pop-up select the product options and click Add Selected.
6. After you have pulled all the items you want, you can cancel the shipment.
Your Products are Pulled to your Store Catalog.