Add your suppliers

A supplier is a business you buy stock from. Shelfcast uses your suppliers to plan reorders around their lead times, to group suggestions into one purchase order per supplier, and to email orders to them.

Suppliers are separate from the Vendor field on your Shopify products. A vendor is a label on the product; a supplier is a record you keep in Shelfcast, with contact details and terms. They’re often the same business, and you can link all of one vendor’s products to a supplier at once.

Add a supplier

1. Go to Suppliers and press Add supplier.
2. Fill in the Name. Everything else is optional.
3. Press Save. You’ll see “Supplier added”.

To add many at once, press Import suppliers and upload a CSV file instead. → Import a CSV

What each field is for

Details

Field	What Shelfcast does with it
Name	Shown everywhere the supplier appears, and printed on purchase orders.
Contact name	Used in the greeting of purchase order emails. Without one, the email greets the supplier by name.
Email	Where purchase orders are sent. Without it, you can still print orders, but not email them.
Phone	Printed on purchase orders.
Website	For your reference.
CC emails	Copied on every purchase order email. Separate addresses with commas.
Address	Printed on purchase orders, under Supplier.

Ordering

Field	What Shelfcast does with it
Lead time (days)	The days from placing an order to it arriving, from 0 to 365. Suggestions plan around it, and drafts created from suggestions are expected after it. Leave it blank to use your default lead time from Settings → Planning (14 days unless you’ve changed it).
Currency	A three-letter code, such as USD. Purchase orders to this supplier show their amounts in it.
Minimum order value	For your reference.
Payment terms	For your reference.

Notes

Anything else you want to remember about the supplier. Notes stay in Shelfcast; they aren’t sent to the supplier.

Minimum order value and payment terms are notes to yourself

Shelfcast keeps them on the supplier, and in imports and exports, but doesn’t print them on purchase orders or check your orders against them. To print payment terms on every purchase order, add them under Terms printed on purchase orders in Settings → Purchase orders.

Currencies

Shelfcast doesn’t convert between currencies. If a supplier bills you in euros, set their currency to EUR and enter their costs in euros: their purchase orders show EUR amounts. Each product’s page shows supplier costs with your store’s currency, whatever the supplier’s currency is, so read those as plain numbers.

Your supplier list

Suppliers lists every supplier with their contact, how many products are linked to them, how many of their orders are open, and their lead time. Default (14 days) means the supplier has no lead time of its own and uses your default. Use Search suppliers to find one.

Open a supplier to edit their details (Save shows “Supplier saved”), to manage the products you buy from them, or to start an order with Create purchase order, which picks the supplier for you.

Delete a supplier

Open the supplier and press Delete supplier. Shelfcast asks “Delete [name]?” and reminds you that “Purchase orders placed with this supplier are kept.”

After deleting:

• Their purchase orders stay, with all their history.
• You can’t choose them for a new purchase order.
• Their products stop using them for suggestions. If a product has another supplier, that one takes over. Suggestions catch up at the next forecast refresh — overnight, or when you press Sync now in Settings → Data.

Next: link products to suppliers.