This page explains how to configure business rules for supplier data in Norce Commerce. Supplier functionality is essential for retail clients and offers extensive business logic for managing product data, pricing, availability, and automation. This guide covers required setup steps, preparation, configuration options, and further reading.
Before configuring supplier business rules, ensure you have completed the following setup steps:
Before starting, decide how you want to use supplier data in Norce Commerce. Consider your business requirements for pricing, product availability, and automation. Gather information about your suppliers, price lists, and product catalogs.
Follow these steps to configure supplier business rules in Norce Commerce:
You can base price rules on purchase costs from supplier product catalogs. Norce supports Cost plus and Margin pricing methods.
To enable cost-based pricing:
- Enable "Chosen Supplier": Activate this setting for suppliers you want to use as the base for price rules.
- Set Penalty Charges: Apply penalty charges to suppliers that should be deprioritized in chosen supplier logic.
- Connect Supplier Price Lists: Link supplier price lists to the client price list that should receive the cost. Only the parent price list needs this connection; child price lists inherit cost purchase unless overridden.
Tip: Some price list population rules offer a "Require supplier" option to exclude products without a purchase cost from the price list.
You can automate product status updates based on supplier product data, not just your own stock. Automation rules include:
- Expiring Status: Physical products are marked
expiringif they previously had supplier stock, but all suppliers have removed them from their catalogs (not just zero availability). - Inactive Status: If the client setting "Set sku status expiring to inactive when out of supplier stock" is enabled, products marked
expiringbecomeinactivewhen both local and supplier stock are zero. - Combined Logic: Products out of local stock but available from suppliers remain
activefor backorder sales. When the last supplier removes the product, it transitions fromexpiringtoinactive. - Drop Shipment Only: Products or categories with this setting ignore local stock for in-stock rules, enabling special handling.
Note: Supplier warehouses must have "ignore stock" set to false for automation rules to apply.
Read more about product status automation.
To manage an extended assortment (products not created in other systems until sold):
- Use the Extended product type in Norce. This type is excluded from automations relying on local warehouses and uses supplier catalog data directly.
- Add product creation rules to automatically create products from supplier catalogs.
- Maintain category and manufacturer mappings for imported supplier catalogs.
- Ensure order integrations handle
extendeditems and create them in the ERP automatically (changing the type tostandard).
Norce supports dropshipping by allowing products or categories to be flagged as "Dropshipping only." This disables certain business logic and automations for these products.
- Use the supplier functionality to select the best supplier for each order.
- Add chosen supplier data to order integrations via Norce Commerce Query.
- Check for
isDropShipOnlyflagged products in orders.
Additional client settings related to supplier business rules:
- Get recommended price from supplier
- Update product measurements from supplier
- Set sku status expiring to inactive when out of supplier stock
- Population settings
- Require manufacturer code
- Require category code
- Require EAN length seed
- Require unique EAN code
After configuring supplier business rules, you may:
- Import supplier products
- Maintain mapping structures for categories and manufacturers
- Continue with further configuration as needed