Overview
The Left to Right Flow allows you to import inventory data directly from your suppliers, create a custom product catalog, and connect that catalog to your sales channels.
Recommended For:
- If you are a newer companies without an established online sales channel
- If you are transitioning to a new sales platform
- If you would like to utilize supplier product data over your current inventory data
- If you are looking to transition to new suppliers instead of your current supplier relationships
- If you would prefer to only import a subset set of your full website catalog into Flxpoint
- If your vendor data does have unifying identifiers (UPC, MPN, GTIN, etc.)
Product Life Cycle
Products go through three phases in the Left to Right Flow.
- Imported as Source Inventory from your sources
- Built into a Product Catalog
- Built into Channel Listings and connected to your sales channels
Source Inventory represents inventory variants that can be fulfilled from each source.
Product Catalog represents your merged and modified versions of inventory variants.
Channel Listings represent sales channel-specific versions of your product variants.
| Example |
|
Source Inventory A "Best Dad coffee mug" is in stock at both our internal warehouse and our distributor's warehouse. Both of these represent Source Inventory. We'll display these two inventory variants in Flxpoint, one from each source. Product Catalog Both of the "Best Dad coffee mug" inventory variants are built into a single product variant within our Product Catalog. They are linked by UPC, and because they have the same UPC, they will be merged together (see Build Products). At this point, the product variant's data can be customized, quantity can be calculated, and pricing rules may be applied. Channel Listings From this one product variant, we can now build three different channel listings: one for our Shopify store, one for BigCommerce and one for Magento. Modified as needed to meet each sales channel's requirements, we can then publish these listings or connect (sync) them to existing items already listed on our sales channels. This "Best Dad coffee mug" will now be kept in sync by Flxpoint, updating pricing, quantity and product content when changes are made. |
Instructions
The 10 Steps of the Left to Right Flow
- Ensure your Sources and Channels have been integrated
- Run the Get Inventory integration to import inventory data
- Confirm and validate imported inventory data in the Source Inventory
- Select the inventory you would like to add to your Product Catalog
- Build the products using your preferred builder and mapping template settings
- Validate and customize data as needed in the Product Catalog
- Create unique listings for each of your Sales Channels
- Complete any channel-specific customizations in the Channel Listings
- Publish the new inventory OR link to existing inventory on your Sales Channels
- Communicate updates via the Sync Listings (pricing and quantity) or Publish Listings (static data) integrations
For a more detailed breakdown of this process, please see our Flxpoint Migration Checklist.