What's new

We build the next feature from what you tell us. If a supplier of yours is not listed, or something would make your shop easier to run, we want to hear it.

Tell us what to build. Email [email protected] with the supplier you buy from, the features you want, or the part of stock keeping that wastes your week. A real person reads every message, and the person who reads it is the person who builds the plugin.

SupplierBoss 1.16.0

Every supplier colour lands in your shop’s filters. With AddOnBoss Pro 2.4.0’s Shop filters, a product built from a supplier tells AddOnBoss the supplier’s own group for each colour. A colour whose name says no colour still finds its family: Bubblegum is Pink, and Sunshine, a pale yellow, is under Yellow and Beige. A striped colour counts as More than one colour. It also tells AddOnBoss what the garment is, so a 32 on trousers is a waist and on a boot a shoe.

PenCarrie’s pattern colours have a family. Colours PenCarrie group under Patterns now show under More than one colour in the Catalogue’s colour filter.

SupplierBoss 1.15.0

Ralawise’s whole range, and Supplier orders that handle the jobs you used to do by hand.

Ralawise’s range, from their files. Upload the two WordPress files from their Marketing Hub, and the Catalogue fills with about 4,300 products, with names, colours, sizes, photographs and prices, ready to build. Their stock comes once products are built, so the Catalogue says Stock: after building instead of showing a nought it does not know. See Ralawise.

Ralawise’s 10 requests a minute. Each update asks about up to 9 of your ranges, the ones asked longest ago, and updates are held a minute apart, so no range is refused for asking too often.

PenCarrie’s own figure. After a send, the order’s goods figure is PenCarrie’s, at your account prices, so it matches your PenCarrie basket. See sending the day.

Artwork on an order says whose it is. Each file says whether it is the customer’s or your proof, when it came, and which one goes. Remove a file before sending, put the customer’s back, or download them all as a zip. See the artwork on an order.

Several Tradeprint orders from one press. Tick them and send: each still goes as its own order. See sending several at once.

Already ordered. Mark an order you placed with the supplier yourself, with their order number, so it is never sent twice. The menu counts what is still waiting. See orders you placed yourself.

Supplier orders opens quickly, on the tab you used last or the first with work waiting.

Plain products name AddOnBoss. Where a plain product per colour needs an options plugin, the Catalogue offers Install AddOnBoss, free or Pro. See building products.

SupplierBoss 1.14.1

Orders that say what happened to them, and two screens that stop promising what they cannot do.

An order is marked Sent only when it went. With real orders switched off, Send no longer marks an order Sent. It stays on the list, and its row says sending is off and where to turn it on. See sending orders to a supplier.

A refused send says why on its row. A wrong password, or a job the printer turned down, puts the order back on the list with the reason, ready to fix and send again. Only an order that went out without a clear answer stays on Being sent.

A press lands where you pressed it. Every button on Supplier orders brings you back to that supplier’s tab, at the order’s row. A send that stops before anything leaves says why, including a proof the customer has not approved.

A build says when photographs did not arrive. The product is still built, but the result says how many photographs were not saved and why, and Update it in my shop fetches them. See when photographs do not arrive.

The column check shows your file’s values. Under each box that names a column sit three real values from it, so a box holding 2 reads Free To Sell Sample: 12 0 240. See how it works out the columns.

The Catalogue says up front which suppliers have a range. A supplier whose codes cannot build one reads No range for and its name, with no button that could only fail. See which suppliers have a range.

SupplierBoss 1.14.0

Shipped 9 October. The garments a print shop actually builds reach PenCarrie.

A garment with AddOnBoss colour and size options reaches PenCarrie by its exact code. Only garments built as WooCommerce variations did before; a simple product carrying option sets arrived without a code and could not be sent. It now reads the same way on its own line and inside a BundleBoss bundle, one order line or split lines, with the print positions in the line. See send a day’s orders as one delivery.

A printed job with nothing chosen is never offered to send. A printer’s product inside a bundle carries no printer configuration. It is refused by name, with the reason, so Send cannot be pressed on a job the printer could not make.

SupplierBoss 1.13.0

Shipped 7 October. The printer-priced product settles its money.

A printer-priced product with AddOnBoss options charges the job and the options. The basket read “Folded (+£5.00)” but charged the printer’s price alone. The line is now job plus options, and the page’s receipt starts from the picked job.

The printer price table follows the shop’s VAT switch. Only the figures shown move; the basket price never changes.

A zero-rated job says so in HMRC’s words. “This product is zero-rated for VAT, so no VAT is added.” under the price, per configuration.

The table shows only the speeds you can order. Saver, Standard and Express. A “Sameday” column could appear, and Same Day cannot be ordered through the printer’s API.

SupplierBoss 1.12.2

Shipped 6 October. A new name, and the first screen looks right again.

The plugin has a new name: SupplierBoss. Only the name changes. Your suppliers, settings, products and licence carry on exactly as they were, and every screen keeps its address, so the update lands in place.

The supplier picker reads as cards again. A heading style meant for Action needed was reaching the picker you see on a first visit, and flattened it into one small line of capitals.

Clearer words for translators. Every placeholder now says what it holds. One also fixes a wrong plural: in some languages a supplier’s 21-minute gap between checks read as “every minute”.

SupplierBoss 1.12.1

Shipped 29 September. A saved sign in can no longer be overwritten by accident.

The account has its own Save. Browsers fill a password box from any sign in they remember, and pressing Save on something else on the same screen could store their guess over a working account. The supplier’s username and password now sit in their own form with their own Save, so saving anything else cannot touch them.

A refused sign in says what the supplier said. Five different causes all printed the same sentence about checking the username and password. The supplier’s own words are now shown, and where they say nothing the message names the two fields to check and the switch only the supplier can throw.

SupplierBoss 1.12.0

Shipped 29 September. Printed products put themselves right when a printer changes their options.

A stale copy of a printer’s options repairs itself. One renamed option at the printer’s end used to fail every price for that product. When they refuse a price now, SupplierBoss re-reads that product’s options, at most once every quarter of an hour, and the next shopper gets a price.

You are told what changed. When a printer changes a product’s options and SupplierBoss takes the new ones, Action needed says which product and what moved, so you can check it still offers what you meant to sell.

A mixture the printer will not sell says so, instead of asking the shopper to try again for ever. And a price a shopper could not be given shows on Action needed with the printer’s own reason, clearing itself when a price arrives.

The price table keeps its place when a quantity part way down is picked.

SupplierBoss 1.11.0

Shipped 24 September. Printed products are quicker to set up and say more to the shopper.

Every list on a printed product’s tab is searchable, and the quantities you cross off stay open while you pick.

Your own lead time, per supplier. Type the working days your shop needs before a job is sent, and every delivery date that supplier quotes moves out by that many. Weekends are skipped.

Each speed column says its own delivery time, so Express, Standard and Saver are no longer three prices with no reason to prefer one.

A save can no longer lose curation settings on a shop whose product editor is larger than the server allows: a short save is refused whole and the panel names the setting to raise. The price table is also the same size on every theme.

SupplierBoss 1.10.1

Shipped 22 September. The connection proves itself before a day’s orders are riding on it.

Check the connection, for PenCarrie. Ordering needs PenCarrie to approve your address and customer code together, and until now the first thing that tested that approval was a real send with a real day’s orders behind it. One press on the supplier’s settings asks their system to list the orders on your account, which proves your details are approved without building anything. Nothing is ordered and nothing is reserved. An account with no orders on it yet is a working connection, and a refusal names both causes in the order worth checking. A supplier whose check counts no products also stops reading as zero products over a working connection: only a check that actually counted something shows a count.

SupplierBoss 1.10.0

Shipped 21 September. A day of wholesale orders goes over as one delivery, and the screen answers the free carriage question.

One delivery, every customer inside it. A wholesaler charges carriage per delivery, so six customers sent separately is six carriage charges on orders that would have cleared the minimum together. Supplier orders now groups what is waiting by the day it arrived, totals each day against the figure your own account uses, and says whether that day has reached it or how far short it is. Tick a day, or tick across days, and what goes over is one order with every customer in it. Each line reference prints beside that customer’s products on the despatch note, so one delivery still breaks back down per customer when the box arrives. See send a day’s orders as one delivery.

The cost of an ordinary product is no longer a blank. A trade cost only ever existed on lines that went through the bulk configurator, which left the day’s total and the whole carriage question with nothing to add up on the products most shops actually sell: the ones a shopper simply bought. Those lines are now priced from your supplier’s catalogue, at the quantity on the order and on the rung that quantity reaches, so six of something is priced as six rather than as six singles. A cost recorded at the sale still wins wherever there is one, and every surface says which of the two it is showing.

Every item is accounted for before anything is sent. What gets built is balanced against the orders it came from, down to the unit, and a mismatch stops the send before your supplier is contacted. An item that could not go, such as one carrying no supplier code, used to drop out quietly while its order was still marked as sent. That order now stays behind and says how many items could not go and why.

SupplierBoss 1.9.0

Shipped 7 September. Tags on the build screen, and updates that keep your own work.

Tags, typed at the moment you know. The build panel takes tags: the schools order, needs photographs, whatever your judgement is. The words your shop already uses are offered as buttons above the box, so the vocabulary never drifts into three spellings of the same thing, and tags stick to the next build the way the markup and the SKU pattern do. They land on the option sets the build writes, which means the options library can answer which garments are for the schools order, not only which supplier sent them.

An update keeps your own work. Updating a built product used to replace its whole option list, taking every set you had attached by hand and every field you had typed with it. An update now refreshes SupplierBoss’s own rows and leaves yours alone, and a photograph kind ticked after the first build arrives on the next update instead of never.

Two smaller honesty fixes. A line above the pricing controls says how the product on screen was priced and when it was last built, read from its own record. And building a style whose items the supplier has discontinued now says so, instead of “Nothing was selected to import” over ticked boxes and a job filed as done.

SupplierBoss 1.8.0

Shipped 5 September. This release is about the screen that asks for your attention earning the right to.

“Needs you” is now “Action needed”. The same wording WordPress uses everywhere, already translated into every language it speaks. The Connect screen’s matching filter is now “Not connected”. The alert badge is red only when a feed is truly broken; everything else, a refused file included, shows amber, because a refusal is the guard working rather than the connection failing. The screen lists the most serious things first, under headings that say what each group is, and the wording across it was rewritten for clarity, messages passed on from suppliers included.

Garment ranges import the way the trade writes them. Clothing sizes sort S to 5XL in the right order, even in merged ranges. Every colour of a garment brings in every photograph type you ticked, not just the first, and you choose which photograph leads each product on the build screen. Sets created by a supplier feed now carry that supplier’s name, so you can always tell yours from theirs.

SupplierBoss 1.7.1

Shipped 4 September, finishing the pair pricing below.

Recalculate all prices replaces every price on the product, so a repricing is a repricing rather than a merge with whatever was there. Every colour and size pair prices from its own cost, and the pricing example on the screen works through the garment actually in front of you.

SupplierBoss 1.7.0

Shipped 4 September. Garment pricing done properly, and a promise kept: what you charge is what the shopper is charged.

Their prices move, and nothing changes until you say so. A wholesaler’s price changes land in a review for your decision, never straight into your shop.

The exact cost of each colour and size pair flows from the supplier’s file into the product, so going up to 3XL can cost a different amount on a White shirt than a Black one, exactly as the supplier prices it. A product built before this arrived can be given its pair prices with one press of Update, a colour ticked later arrives priced, and a SKU clash now names the supplier involved instead of quietly costing a size.

SupplierBoss 1.6.1

Shipped 3 September. One pricing correction, found on a live shop the same day and fixed the same day.

Size and colour surcharges land in your shop’s own tax terms. Suppliers quote ex VAT. On a shop that enters prices inclusive of tax, a built uplift was stored as if it already included the tax, so the storefront charged less than the supplier’s step: a £1.40 ex VAT uplift showed and charged as £1.17. Built prices now ride the same lens Tradeprint quotes always have, and shops that enter prices excluding tax are untouched.

Surcharges are the supplier’s true steps. Uplifts are computed before your price ending is applied, so a .90 or .95 ending styles the product’s price without bending every uplift around it. Products already built keep their prices and surcharges, as always: rebuild a style fresh, or adjust the uplifts in its option sets, for the corrected figures to land.

SupplierBoss 1.6.0

Shipped 3 September. Garment pricing done properly, honest answers on the printed-to-order form, and photographs for every colour, all from a shop selling real PenCarrie and Tradeprint ranges.

Every colour is priced on its own cost. A garment build used to price the whole style from whichever colour happened to come first in the supplier’s list. Now the product’s base is the cheapest colour, dearer colours carry their own charge, and every colour-and-size figure is handed to AddOnBoss so the exact combination is charged: a Black 3XL is priced from the Black 3XL cost, not another colour’s arithmetic. Products built before this pick up the corrected prices with one fresh build.

Every colour is photographed. Each chosen colourway’s front shot joins the product gallery, and each colour choice carries its own photo, so picking Red shows the red garment. A photo you set yourself is never replaced.

“That combination is not available” only means that now. A price fetch that failed asks the shopper to try again in a moment; a grid emptied by your own Quantities or Delivery speeds setting says so and names the setting; the refusal is kept for combinations the printer’s own catalogue rules out. And a product you link learns its printer’s valid pairings seconds after saving, instead of waiting for a scheduled check, so its page narrows the choices from the very first visit.

Money reads cleanly. A zero-rated product’s From price is said once even under a VAT display toggle, and the admin screens print what an order costs you as one plain trade figure. The supplier card’s run-size picker is named Quantities and loads reliably.

SupplierBoss 1.5.0

Shipped 2 September. A polish release on the printed-to-order form, from watching real hands use it: the form holds still, and every wait says what it is doing.

The questions sit two abreast where the page gives them room, one column on phones. A dropdown that has been answered stays a dropdown. Nothing changes shape, appears or disappears as choices are made; only the prices react.

Changing a choice greys the standing prices instead of clearing them. The table dims until the fresh figures land and is only torn down on the first ask, when there is nothing worth keeping. Screen readers are told the block is busy.

“Show larger runs” now says “Show more quantities, up to 20,000”, and folds back with “Show fewer quantities”. A run is print-trade vocabulary; the column is headed Quantity, so the button speaks the same word.

A delivery date being fetched says so. While the supplier is asked, the order summary holds “Working out your delivery date…” in the exact spot the date will land, so the box never grows. The sentence keeps up when quantities are clicked in quick succession, and it comes off rather than standing as a promise if the supplier never answers.

The “Start these choices again” link is gone. Narrowing already clears any earlier pick a new choice rules out and names what it took; that note now puts itself away on the next pick that rules nothing out.

SupplierBoss 1.4.0

Shipped 2 September. One money fix and one diagnosis, both from a shop running SupplierBoss on live orders.

A mixed product is priced in the VAT class its own line is charged in. A supplier’s file can carry a different rate for each configuration, and the cart line has taken the chosen configuration’s class since 1.2.0. The storefront did not: both helpers that priced the page read the product’s class instead, so the page and the till could disagree. On a shop showing prices inc VAT, a configuration carrying no VAT was still shown with twenty percent on it. On a shop that enters prices inclusive, the same mismatch ran the other way and undercharged. The page and the line now read the same class. See sell printed products.

A failed run records how it failed, not only that it did. Each run keeps the status the supplier answered with, which call it was, the timeout it was given, how long it actually waited, and how many bytes arrived against how many were promised. It is kept on successful runs too, because a bad night is only legible against a good one. No credential is ever recorded, and that is pinned by a test. It reads as a fold on the run in Supplier history, and the failure email links straight to it. See health and alerts.

Why the emails are not quieter yet

The other half of that request, sending mail only when the state changes rather than on every failed run, is deliberately not built yet. Suppressing repeat failures would hide exactly the runs whose fingerprint the new trace has only just started collecting. A few weeks of real runs first, then we will know which repeats are worth a second email and which are noise.

SupplierBoss 1.3.0

Shipped 1 September. A display release: how prices and delivery promises read on printed products is now the shop’s choice.

Prices as a table, or as two dropdowns. The table stays the default, because seeing every run size against every speed is what sells a bigger run. The new form asks for a quantity and a speed and shows one price, for shops that want a simpler page. Every quantity option carries its price and its price for one, so opening the list still reads as the ladder. See sell printed products.

Delivery promised four ways. The date each speed arrives, the date with a note that artwork approval comes first, the printer’s quote said as working days after artwork approval, or no dates at all. A shop that checks artwork before printing no longer has to publish a date a slow approval would break.

The answer reads as a receipt. What a shopper has chosen is now the headline, with the delivery promise and the price for one beneath it, and the total under its own name.

Smaller things. The supplier connect screen reads leaner, one line of help per setting, and the printer’s fallback date format now shows in your shop’s own words.

SupplierBoss 1.2.0

Shipped 31 August. The headline came from our founding customer’s own question: which printed products carry VAT, and which do not?

VAT follows the printer’s own data. Whether a print job carries VAT depends on its exact specification. A plain leaflet is zero-rated; the same leaflet laminated is not. Tradeprint publishes the rate for every configuration, and SupplierBoss now reads it. A wholly zero-rated product gets the Zero rate tax class when you link it. A product you linked earlier shows what their data says and offers a tick to match, and is never changed quietly. A product that carries both rates charges each basket line at the rate of the configuration chosen. See sell printed products.

Run sizes are crossed off, not typed. The supplier box lists every run size the printer quotes, and you pick the ones not to offer. Everything else stays on sale, including sizes the printer adds later.

A rebuild holds its shape. Rebuilding a style under a different shape than it was built with is refused in plain words, instead of writing stray variations under a plain product.

Smaller things. The supplier tab reads leaner, with one line of help under each control. On shop and category pages a printed-to-order product now reads Select options and opens its page, like a variable product, instead of offering an instant add it cannot honour.

SupplierBoss 1.1.0

The first release built from a real shop’s daily use. A founding customer ran SupplierBoss against their own supplier account, and this release is what their fortnight of feedback turned into.

Building products got richer:

• Choose the photographs. Suppliers photograph a garment several ways. The build panel shows each kind as a tile with a real picture, and you tick the ones you want. The first becomes the product photo, the rest go into the gallery.
• What arrives with a build. A fold-out on the build panel lists everything the build carries: weights, costs, photos, barcodes. It counts from the supplier’s own data, so “none in this supplier’s data” is said before you build, not discovered after.
• Review before a bulk build. Build all from the tray now opens a review sheet first: every product, its colours and sizes, and the settings the batch shares. Building starts when you confirm.
• Barcodes. Where the supplier publishes them, they land in WooCommerce’s own GTIN field.
• Build says Update. On a style already in your shop, the button says Update it in my shop, so there is no guessing which will happen.

The range now watches itself. Once a day SupplierBoss re-reads each supplier’s catalogue. New products and colours appear as a quiet line on the Catalogue screen. A product you stock that the supplier no longer lists gets a row on Needs you, and nothing is ever removed over it. See browse the range.

Printed products got a proper trim. On one product you can now hide the printer’s values you do not sell, set defaults, fix a choice and hide its question, and offer only the run sizes you want. Each pick also narrows the next dropdown to what can still be made. Number lists sort as numbers, and the shopper-facing wording never names your printer. An AddOnBoss upload field on the page now feeds the print artwork by itself. See sell printed products.

Finding your way around. Suppliers is its own row in the menu, so the supplier screens are one click from anywhere. Option sets built by SupplierBoss are named “SKU - Product name”. The set library search matches the SKU, so a set is findable by the code you actually know.

SupplierBoss is out

SupplierBoss is out. Sold from bossmage.com, never WordPress.org, with fourteen days free on every plan and no card asked for.

What the first release does:

• Keeps stock right. Reads a wholesaler on a schedule and writes only what changed. Your own settings are snapshotted before the first write and handed back in full if you stop using a supplier.
• Refuses a bad file. A feed that shrinks by half, an error page dressed as data, or a half finished download is refused. The refusal is announced rather than passing quietly. See why it refuses.
• Mirror, or hold back what you sold. A fresh feed cannot put sold stock back on sale unless you want it to. See keeping stock right.
• Builds the products. Browse the range, pick colours and sizes, and get products with the right SKUs, size order, photographs, weights and today’s stock. See building products.
• Sells what a printer makes. Live price tables from a trade printer’s own ladder, with your markup on top. Orders queue, and nothing is sent until you have looked at it. See sell printed products and sending orders.
• Says when it stops. Run history on the board, and an email when a supplier goes quiet and again when it recovers.

A licence gates the actions, never your data: everything already in your shop stays visible and editable if a licence lapses. What stops is fetching, building and sending.

Proven against a real supplier

Run end to end against a live trade account and a real WooCommerce store, not only against tests.

• PenCarrie by token. Their whole range, live stock, and products built from it. Sixty variations with all sixty photographs in about four seconds.
• The catalogue browser, filled from a real 54 MB product export at the memory limit an ordinary shop actually has.
• Refusing a bad file. A short file, an error page carrying a healthy reply code, a login page, an empty feed, a product list with no quantities.
• Building products in all three shapes, including building the same style again without creating a second product or losing a price you set.
• Handing the shop back. Stop using a supplier, proven on a real store. The awkward cases are covered: a product not managing stock, a null quantity, and a product you had taken back by hand.
• Reading a file server, proven against a real FTP server rather than a mock.

Built and tested, not yet seen a live account

These are written from what the supplier publishes and tested against their documented behaviour, including the awkward parts. They should work. If you are a customer of one, we would like to hear how it goes.

• Ralawise. Their sign in rather than a token, and one request per range, because they have no list-everything call. Their documented habit of answering with an informational message and a healthy reply code is handled.
• BTC Activewear. Their FTP file, refreshed every five minutes, with the column positions already known so there is nothing to map.
• Prestige Leisure. Their FTP file, refreshed hourly.

Ordering from your supplier

The other half of the job: when a customer buys, somebody has to order from the wholesaler. That is built for Tradeprint, and it ships in this release.

An order that can be sent waits on a Supplier orders screen until you press send. Nothing goes on its own. There is no bulk send and no automatic trigger, because a thing that spends your money should not do it while you sleep. Before anything is sent it is rebuilt from the order, checked against the supplier, stopped if the trade cost has moved since the order came in, and locked so two presses cannot buy it twice. There is a test mode where nothing is made and nothing is charged.

Sending orders to a supplier covers the screen, and sell printed products covers what a shopper is quoted in the first place.

Next

A browsable range for file suppliers. Most supplier codes are three parts, so a range can be folded out of a plain stock file. That works for PenCarrie and Ralawise today, and widening it to spreadsheet and feed suppliers is the next piece of catalogue work.

More suppliers by name. Named profiles are convenience rather than capability, since any supplier who publishes a file already works. They save you a setup step, they are cheap to add, and we add them from what people actually buy from, so tell us who you use.

Not planned

Becoming your inventory system. SupplierBoss keeps WooCommerce in step with a wholesaler. If you need purchase orders, warehouse locations and multi-channel stock, that is a different kind of product and you should buy one.

Writing anything other than stock. It will not change your prices, your descriptions or your photographs on a product you already had. That boundary is deliberate and is not going to move.

Telling us something

The roadmap moves with what shops actually ask for, and at this stage it moves a lot. [email protected], and the two most useful things you can send are which wholesaler you buy from and how you get their stock into your site today.