Flxpoint Product Flow Guide
Summary
Explains the two directions data moves through Flxpoint: product data flowing left to right from Source Inventory into your Product Catalog, Listings, and Sales Channels, and orders flowing right to left from Channel Orders through Order Routing and Fulfillment Requests back to Sources and shipment tracking.
Flxpoint sits in the middle of two continuous flows of data: one that turns supplier inventory into live listings on your sales channels, and one that turns channel orders into fulfilled, tracked shipments. Together these two flows make up the full Flxpoint product flow — the end-to-end path every product and every order travels through the platform.
The Left → Right flow moves product data outward: from Source Inventory, into your Product Catalog, out to Channel Listings, and onto your Sales Channels. The Right → Left flow moves orders inward: from Channel Orders, through Order Routing, into Fulfillment Requests sent to your Sources, and back out again as shipments and tracking updates on the channel. Both flows run on the same underlying data — the Master SKU — which is why it helps to understand them together rather than as separate features.
Source Inventory → Product Catalog
Supplier and warehouse feeds land in Source Inventory as raw data: quantities, costs, and identifiers (UPC, MPN, or GTIN) exactly as the source sends them. From there, you choose which source items to bring into your Product Catalog and build them into products using your preferred builder and mapping settings. Items from multiple sources that share the same identifier merge into a single catalog product, so one product record can be backed by several sources at once.
Product Catalog → Listings → Sales Channels
Once a product is validated and enriched in the catalog — title, description, images, pricing — you create a Listing for each sales channel it should appear on. Listings let you customize or override catalog data per channel (different pricing, different attributes, different content) before publishing. After the initial publish, ongoing syncs keep the channel current: one sync pushes price and quantity changes, another pushes content changes, so the channel always reflects what is in the catalog.
- Source Inventory · raw supplier/warehouse data
- Product Catalog · merged and enriched product records
- Channel Listings · channel-specific versions of a product
- Sales Channels · where the listing actually goes live
Channel Orders → Order Routing
When a customer places an order on a sales channel, Flxpoint pulls it in as a Channel Order. Order Routing then decides which source (or sources, for multi-line orders) should fulfill each line item, based on your routing rules — things like source priority, inventory availability, or cost.
Fulfillment Requests → Sources
Once routing decides where an order line should go, Flxpoint generates a Fulfillment Request and sends it to the assigned source, using whatever method that source supports. The source acknowledges the request and prepares the shipment.
Shipments → back to the Channel
When the source ships the order, Flxpoint receives the shipment and tracking information and syncs it back out to the originating sales channel, so the order shows as shipped with tracking for the customer. This closes the loop: the order that came in on the right side of the flow leaves fulfilled on the same side it started.
The two flows are not separate systems — they share the same backbone. Every product in your catalog has a Master SKU, and that Master SKU is the thread that ties a channel listing back to the source (or sources) that can fulfill it.
- Mapping links a Master SKU to one or more Source SKUs. It is built during the Left → Right flow, when you build products from source inventory, and it is what Order Routing reads during the Right → Left flow to know which source(s) can fulfill a given order line.
- Inventory sync runs continuously in the background: as source quantities change, the catalog and channel listings update; as orders consume inventory, available quantity decreases across that same chain. The same mechanics that publish a product also keep it accurate while it is being sold.
In short: the Left → Right flow builds the map from source to channel, and the Right → Left flow uses that same map in reverse to fulfill what the channel sells.
- Keep identifiers (UPC, MPN, SKU) consistent across source feeds so multi-source merging and order routing both work correctly.
- Keep inventory and listing syncs running on a schedule so the Left → Right side of the flow stays current without manual triggers.
- Review Order Routing rules whenever you add or remove a source, since routing depends on the same mapping built during catalog setup.
- Watch fulfillment request acknowledgment and shipment/tracking sync as the health check for the Right → Left side — a stuck acknowledgment usually points to a source-side issue, not a Flxpoint issue.