Browse your supplier's range

BossMage, Catalogue is your supplier’s catalogue inside your admin: names, brands, colour names, swatches, size runs and photographs, with today’s stock beside them. You look through what they sell the way you would look through their brochure, then pick what you want to sell and build it.

A stock file on its own gives you codes and quantities. That is enough to keep a shop right, but not enough to choose anything, because it is a list of part numbers. The range is what makes it browsable.

Which suppliers have a range

This is the part to check before you plan around it.

Supplier	What you get
PenCarrie	The full range: names, brands, descriptions, colour names, real swatches and photographs.
Ralawise	A skeleton built from their codes: every style, colourway and size, with no names or pictures.
Everyone else	No browsable range yet. Their stock updates work exactly as normal.

If you press Fetch the range on a supplier that has none, StockBoss says so plainly rather than filling the screen with meaningless rows.

Building the range from any supplier's codes

Most supplier codes are three parts: a style, a colour and a size. That means a range can be folded out of a plain stock file, with nothing extra from the supplier. It is how the Ralawise skeleton is made. Widening it to spreadsheet and feed suppliers is on the list; today it is those two.

Finding things

The catalogue grid gives you:

• Search, by code or by name.
• Brand, because most wholesalers carry dozens and you probably sell three.
• Colour family chips, so “show me the greens” is one press rather than reading a hundred colour names.
• Sort and paging, sixty to a page, for walking a range in order.
• A freshness bar saying how current the range is, with a live progress bar while it fills.

Filling a large range takes a while and runs in the background in slices. You can leave the screen and it carries on.

One style

Opening a style gives you everything about it in one place:

• A photograph that follows the colour you pick, so you are looking at the garment you are choosing rather than a stand-in.
• Colour tiles with today’s stock on each. Select all, only the ones in stock, none, a whole colour family, or a run by holding shift. The first twelve with stock are picked for you to start from.
• Size chips, in the order your supplier lists them rather than alphabetical.
• What the button will do, in products and variations, printed on a bar along the bottom before you press anything.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Ten colours by seven sizes is seventy variations; a hundred colours would be over nine hundred. Knowing which you are about to create beats finding out.

No photographs needed

Plenty of wholesalers publish stock and no pictures at all. Where there is no photograph, StockBoss draws the garment: a silhouette for the kind of thing it is, tinted to the real colour. Readable at thumbnail size and at full size, and it is the ordinary case rather than a fallback.

The range re-reads itself overnight

Wholesalers retire styles, add colours and launch lines, and none of that shows in a stock file. So StockBoss re-reads each supplier’s range once a day, in the small hours, and sorts what it finds into two places:

• New things go to the Catalogue. The next time you open it, a quiet line says: “New in their range since you last looked: 14 new products, and 3 new colours in styles you stock.” News is an opportunity, not an alarm. So it lives on the screen where you browse, not on a warning list.
• Leavers go to Needs you. A product you stock that the supplier no longer lists is worth a person’s decision. StockBoss tells you and touches nothing: no product is ever removed or hidden over it. See health, history and alerts.

Unread news adds up, so a week away reads as one line saying fourteen, not seven lines saying two. Neither finding sends an email. Email stays reserved for a supplier whose stock updates have stopped.

A range you uploaded as a file is not re-read overnight. Re-reading an unchanged upload would stamp it fresh while it quietly ages. Upload a new file when the supplier sends one.

The range and the stock keep different clocks

A product export changes about as often as a brochure, while the numbers change all day. Filling in names and pictures never touches a stock figure that is minutes old, so a month-old export cannot overwrite a fresh number.

Then build what you sell

Picking is the point. Once you have chosen the colours and sizes, StockBoss builds real WooCommerce products from them, already connected to the supplier’s codes. See Build products from the range.