Setting up suppliers and product assignment

A supplier in Stockie is a business you buy from. Assigning products to it tells Stockie what you buy from them, which is what drives purchase orders and per-supplier lead times.

Find them under Suppliers .

Before setting any up, be sure your Shopify Vendor field holds suppliers rather than brands - see Suppliers vs Shopify vendors. One supplier can carry many vendors, and that relationship is hard to build later.

Creating a supplier

1. Go to Suppliers  and click Create supplier.
2. Give it a name.
3. Add its details - contact, address and currency, plus the defaults it should apply to purchase orders: Default payment terms, Default purchase tax, Default shipping tax, and the reorder figures below.
4. Assign the products you buy from them.
5. Save.

A supplier also carries Internal notes, which stay in Stockie, and Purchase order notes, which go out on the order itself.

The lead time you set here is used by forecasting for every product assigned to this supplier, in place of your store default. It is usually a better fit than a store-wide figure, because delivery time is a property of the supplier. See Configuring reordering settings.

Assigning products

Two ways, and the choice matters more than it looks.

Specific products - pick individual products. Best for a supplier with a small or arbitrary set that shares no common attribute.

Conditions - rules that match products automatically. Best for a large catalogue, or for everything sharing a vendor, tag or product type.

Building a condition

A condition is a field, an operator and a value. Not every field takes every operator:

"All" means is equal to, is not equal to, starts with, ends with, contains and does not contain. Combine several conditions with AND or OR.

Vendor is equal to Rapala  assigns everything from that vendor. SKU starts with PCW-  assigns by your own coding. Tag is equal to spring-2026 AND Vendor is equal to Rapala  narrows to one range from one brand.

ABC class only appears once you have forecast data to classify against, and Supplier only once your supplier setup is complete.

Which conditions filter the purchase order picker

Assignment and the purchase order product picker are not the same thing, and this is where most confusion about supplier assignment comes from.

When you raise a purchase order, the product picker is narrowed to the supplier's products only if that supplier's conditions use:

• Vendor with is equal to, or
• Tag with is equal to or is not equal to

Any other condition leaves the picker showing your whole catalogue. So a supplier assigned by SKU starts with PCW-  has its products correctly assigned - forecasting and reordering all work - but the picker is not filtered.

Three more cases where the picker is not narrowed:

• A mix. If any one condition in the set is outside the two supported forms, none of them narrow the picker.
• Several vendor rules combined with AND. A product has one vendor, so that combination would match nothing. Use OR.
• Values containing a comma. With a single vendor or tag rule, the picker's search box is pre-filled with the value instead; with more than one, no filtering is applied.

Assigning products by hand never narrows the picker.

If you want the picker filtered, assign that supplier by vendor or tag.

Taking products back off

A broad condition sweeps in more than you meant - a vendor rule catching products you actually buy elsewhere, for example. Narrow the condition by adding a second clause, rather than trying to fix it product by product.

New vendors are added automatically

If you set your suppliers up using Import from Shopify vendors, Stockie keeps doing it. When a product arrives carrying a vendor with no supplier, a supplier is created for it.

That is helpful if your vendors really are your suppliers. If they are brands, your supplier list keeps growing on its own - another reason to settle that question first.

Importing suppliers

The import creates suppliers. It does not update ones you already have.

A row whose supplier name matches an existing supplier is skipped, matched without regard to capitalisation. Duplicate names within the file itself are also rejected, with the row number of the first one reported.

So you will not end up with two copies of a supplier by importing twice - but re-importing a corrected file will not apply your corrections either. Those rows are skipped as already-existing, and the result reports them as skipped rather than created.

To change suppliers you already have, edit them individually, or contact us to change many at once.

When an import finishes, check the created and skipped counts against the number of rows in your file. Skipped rows are almost always names you already have.

Deleting a supplier

Deleting a supplier removes it from your list and unassigns its products. Purchase orders already raised against it are not deleted.

If you are cleaning up a supplier list built from the wrong source, read Suppliers vs Shopify vendors first - reassigning may be a better move than deleting.

Finding products with no supplier

There is no filter for products without a supplier. The practical check is to compare your assigned product counts against your catalogue, or to work supplier by supplier.