Base offers the possibility to list products directly from the online shop’s or wholesaler’s external warehouse – in this case the built-in Base inventory is bypassed (direct scenario).
Alternatively, you can connect your store or wholesaler’s warehouse with Base inventory. Then the products are listed and synchronized directly with the inventory.
In this case, make sure that both the external warehouse and the Base inventory have the same products. Then you need to associate them with each other.
Such an association can be performed:
- from the Base inventory;
- when importing products into Base inventory from a store, wholesaler or marketplace;
- when exporting products from Base inventory to selected shops.
Creating associations from the inventory section
To bulk associate products in Base inventory with products from an external storage (store or wholesaler), go to Products → Product list.
Then select the products and choose the button Operations → Associate with products from the shop/wholesale.
In addition, you can associate a single product by selecting the Associations option from the product context menu.
Product association card
The Product associations tab will display two types of information:
- which external warehouses the product is associated with;
- which marketplace offers the product is associated with.
To associate a product with an external warehouse, select the Add link button in the External storages associations section.
And then select the appropriate storage and click the Execute… button.
Association creation mechanism
On the next step, you can manually enter the product ID (and possibly the variant ID) in the external storage.
This includes options:
- Set product ID for all;
- Set variant ID for all.
These options are useful when you want for example to reset the associations (associate all products with ID 0).
Additional features
For establishing associations, you can also use the following options:
- Enable product hints – then a search engine will appear next to each text field, allowing you to find the product based on the entered name;
- Match automatically – the product name EAN and SKU from the Base inventory will be compared with the EAN, SKU, and product names in the storage. If a match is found, the corresponding product number will appear next to the offer. If your stock contains large volumes of products, matching may take several minutes;
- Load associations from a file –in this case a CSV file with rows in the following format Product ID from inventory;Product ID;Variant ID is required.
After matching the correct associations, select Save associations button.
Done – in the product table, in the Integrations column you will see new information indicating that the product has been associated with the new warehouse.
Creating associations when importing
When importing products from an external warehouse (shop or wholesaler), Base automatically associates a product from that warehouse with a product created from it in the Base inventory.
Creating associations when exporting
When exporting products from Base inventory to the shop’s external storage (export to wholesaler is not possible) Base automatically associates a product from the Base inventory with a shop product created from it.
Application
Such associations enable:
- fetching stock and prices from a shop or wholesaler’s storage into the Base inventory;
- Pushing stocks and prices from Base inventory to the shop’s warehouse (this is not possible for wholesalers). In the section Integrations → Online shop/wholesale → Prices/Stock, you can enable retrieving stocks and prices from an external storage or sending stocks and prices from Base inventory to an external storage;
- manual update of Base inventory products based on import of products from a shop or from a wholesaler. To do this, when importing, select Only update previously imported products or Download new products and update existing ones mode.