Supplier lead times, contacts and email placeholders
Available on: Pro and above.
A supplier record holds the contact and address details you would expect, plus two things that do real work: a lead time that feeds forecasting, and email recipients that decide who receives purchase orders.
Edit them at Suppliers → [supplier] → Manage .
Lead time is the highest-value field on the record
Set a lead time on a supplier and every product whose primary supplier it is uses that figure instead of your store default.
This is almost always a better fit than a store-wide number, because delivery time is a property of the supplier rather than of your store. An overseas supplier at 45 days and a local one at 3 days both stay accurate without touching a single product.
Lead time drives when Stockie tells you to reorder, so a wrong figure here shifts every reorder point on that supplier's products.
You can also set safety stock and restock to per supplier. All three sit between your store defaults and any per-variant override:
variant override → primary supplier → store default
Each resolves on its own, so a product can take its lead time from the supplier and its restock to from your store default. See Configuring reordering settings.
Contact details
Contact name is the person you deal with. It is worth filling in even if you never print it, because it feeds the {{supplierContact}} placeholder in purchase order emails.
Company is the trading name, which can differ from the supplier name you use internally.
Currency is the currency you buy in, applied to purchase orders for that supplier.
Internal notes are private and never shared with the supplier. Purchase order notes pre-fill the note to supplier when you create an order for them, so it is a starting point you can edit per order rather than something fixed.
Purchase order recipients
A supplier can have several email recipients, not one.
- To - the addresses the purchase order is sent to
- CC - copied on every purchase order for this supplier
Addresses are stored in lower case and deduplicated, and an address in the CC list is never repeated if it is already in To.
Email placeholders
When sending a purchase order you can personalise the message with placeholders, which are replaced with the real values as the email goes out:
| Placeholder | Inserts |
|---|---|
{{poNumber}} |
The purchase order number, for example #PO42 |
{{shopName}} |
Your store name |
{{supplierName}} |
The supplier name |
{{supplierContact}} |
The supplier contact person's name |
{{supplierCompany}} |
The supplier company name |
{{itemCount}} |
The number of line items - rows, not units |
{{totalUnits}} |
Total units ordered across all lines |
{{total}} |
The formatted total cost, for example $1,234.00 USD |
{{destinationLocation}} |
The ship-to location name and address |
{{receiveLocation}} |
The Shopify location where inventory is received |
{{noteToSupplier}} |
The note to supplier text |
{{purchaseOrderLineItems}} |
The line items as a text list, with quantity, product, variant, supplier SKU and SKU |
{{supplierContact}} falls back to "there" when a supplier has no contact name, so an email opening Hi {{supplierContact}}, still reads correctly. {{supplierName}} does the same, which matters because the default message opens with it.