Suppliers vs Shopify vendors

A Shopify vendor is usually who makes a product. A Stockie supplier is who you buy it from. Sometimes they are the same company. Often they are not.

Settle this before you set up suppliers. Getting it wrong is the most common setup mistake in Stockie, and it is much easier to answer now than to unpick later.

The question to answer first

Open a few products in your Shopify admin and look at the Vendor field.

• Does it hold brand names - the labels you stock?
• Or does it hold the businesses you place orders with?

If your vendors are your suppliers

Stockie can create a supplier for each vendor and link the matching products in one step.

In the supplier setup, choose Import from Shopify vendors and then Import vendors as suppliers. It creates a supplier for each of your Shopify vendors and links all matching products. Stockie says as much on the card itself: it is recommended if you use Shopify's vendor field to track your actual suppliers.

Before you commit, the card lists the vendors it is about to import - the first ten, then a count of the rest. Read them. If those ten look like brands rather than businesses you order from, stop, and check a few of the others before deciding: the next section is probably you.

The choice keeps acting after setup

Importing vendors is not a one-off. A store set up this way keeps creating suppliers: when a product arrives carrying a vendor Stockie has no supplier for, one is created automatically, with a rule attaching that vendor's products to it.

That is what you want if your vendors really are your suppliers - new suppliers appear as you start buying from them, with no setup. If your vendors are brands, your supplier list grows a new entry every time you stock a new label, and nobody is doing it on purpose.

It is the strongest reason to answer the question above before you choose, rather than assuming a wrong import can simply be tidied up later.

If your vendors are brands

Do not import them. Choose Create suppliers manually and Start from scratch instead, then assign products to your suppliers.

One supplier can carry many vendors. A distributor who ships you six brands is one supplier, and all six brands' products are assigned to it. That relationship cannot exist if every brand became its own supplier.

Product assignment can be done by hand or by conditions, so you do not have to touch products one at a time. Conditions can match on the vendor field, among others - which means you can still use your brand vendors as the rule for assigning products to the right supplier, without turning each brand into a supplier.

See Setting up suppliers and product assignment.

What the vendor import actually brings across

The name, and the product links. Nothing else.

That is not a limitation Stockie chose - a Shopify vendor is a text field on a product. There is no address, no contact, no email, no lead time and no payment terms behind it, because Shopify does not store any. Everything else on the supplier record is yours to fill in afterwards.

What goes wrong when they are conflated

The failure shows up on purchase orders.

If you import brands as suppliers, every product carrying that brand's vendor name is linked to that "supplier". Raise a purchase order for it and the product picker offers you the whole brand range - including items you actually buy from a distributor, or from nobody at all any more.

You end up with a supplier list that reads like a brand directory, and purchase orders that pull in products the supplier does not sell you.

Fixing it afterwards

You can reassign products between suppliers, edit supplier records, and delete suppliers you created by mistake. A store that has imported the wrong thing is recoverable.

If you have already built purchase orders against the wrong suppliers, or the list is large enough that reassigning by hand is impractical, contact support before you start - some of it can be done in bulk.