# Setup: Configure business rules for supplier data

Supplier is a core functionality for retail clients, and has a lot of business logic that can be utilized, for those who wants it.

## Required steps

- Set up suppliers
- Set up product structure


## Preparations

Decide on what you want to do with your supplier data in Norce.

## How-to

Read about the different functionality below.

### Cost bases pricing settings

You can base price rules on purchase costs that comes from "chosen supplier" product catalogs. Use the [Cost plus](/solution-portal/detailed-design/price-methods#cost-plus-based-on-purchase-cost) or [Margin](/solution-portal/detailed-design/price-methods#margin-based-on-purchase-cost) methods.

Make sure that you have

- **Enabled chosen supplier** on those suppliers you want to use as a base for your price rules
- **Set penalty charges**, for suppliers who should be penalized in the chosen supplier logic
- **Connect the supplier price lists** to the client price list that should get the cost, only the parent needs this connection. The child price lists will inherit cost purchase. Although, if you want to override a child price list with different chosen suppliers, you connect them separately to the specific child price list.


> Note also that some logic, like population rules on price lists have an option for "Require supplier" which is handy if you want to discard all product who does not have a purchase cost from the price list as a whole.


### Status automation settings

You can add status automation based on supplier products instead of only base them on your own availability. Here is a summary:

1. Your physical products (Standard products), will be marked `expiring` if they have had supplier onhand earlier, but they are all inactivated (note, 0 in availability is not enough, they must be removed from the supplier's catalog entirely)
2. If you have enabled the client setting "Set sku status expiring to inactive when out of supplier stock", `expiring` product will be set `inactive` when both local and supplier stock is 0.
3. Both points above work together, which means that a physical product that is out of local stock, but is sold from suppliers might be `active` for (back order) sales. Until the last supplier doesn't have it in their catalog anymore, then the product will automatically be set `inactive` (first `expiring` from point 1 above and then directly to `inactive` from point 2)
4. Products and categories have a setting - **Drop shipment only** that disregard all local stock for the in-stock based rules, even if they have a local stock. This makes it possible to specially mark products for special handling.


> Note that supplier warehouses must have "ignore stock" set to false to be used by the automation rules above.


Read more about status automation [here](/solution-portal/detailed-design/product-status-rules).

### Extended assortment settings

If you want to work with a separate extended assortment that is not created in other systems until it is sold, you can
use the Extended product type in Norce. This type is excluded from automations and business rules that rely on local
warehouses, instead drawing information directly from supplier catalogs.

- Add **product creation rules**, to automatically create products from supplier catalogs.
- Maintain the **mappings** for category and manufacturer from the imports of supplier catalogs
- Make sure that order integrations handles items of the type `extended` and create them in the ERP automatically (and changes the type to `standard`)


### Dropshipping

Norce has some features to enable products or whole categories as "Dropshipping only", disabling some business logic and automations on these products. If you use the supplier functionality in Norce to choose the best possible supplier for each situation, you can add chosen supplier data to your order integration directly, from Norce Commerce Query. Check for `isDropShipOnly` flagged products on the orders.

### Further configuration

- Client settings
  - [Get recommended price from supplier](/user-portal/settings/client-settings#products)
  - [Update product measurements from supplier](/user-portal/settings/client-settings#products)
  - [Set sku status expiring to inactive when out of supplier stock](/user-portal/settings/client-settings#sku-status-automation)
  - [Population settings](/user-portal/settings/client-settings#population)
    - Require manufacturer code
    - Require category code
    - Require EAN length seed
    - Require unique EAN code


## Further reading

- Read about how to set up supplier [here](/setup/suppliers).


## Where to go from here

- Import supplier products
- Maintain a mapping structure