Setting up Suppliers, Warehouses and 3PLs

PLEASE HAVE EVERYONE ON YOUR TEAM WHO DEALS WITH INVENTORY STUDY THIS COURSE.

We also highly encourage you to book your one-on-one onboarding call WITH YOUR TEAM so everybody is trained. :) Schedule an on-boarding

In this quick video, you'll learn how to set up your vendors (Suppliers, Warehouses, etc.) in SoStocked.

Want to edit or add vendors in bulk? Go here.

How to Add a New Vendor

How To Set Up Vendors

When you first connect your SoStocked account to Amazon, it will import all of your vendors. Whether it's a supplier, a warehouse, a prep center, or a freight forwarder -- it's going to import all of that data from your Amazon Seller Central account. Any ship from address or ship to address in Seller Central will be imported as a vendor. So what you need to do is to go to your Vendors page, and look over these vendors and make sure that the correct vendor type is assigned to them.

You can also easily archive old vendors like the ones that are shipped from addresses that you're not using anymore. You can simply put a check on the box beside its ID number, click "Bulk Actions" then select "Archive" to clean up the list so that you can reduce it down to the vendors that you're actually using currently.

The next thing you want to do is rename the vendor name -- so let's take ABC Supplier as an example.

Updating Vendor Info

You can rename it by typing on the "Vendor Name" whatever you want it to be called. You can also assign it as a supplier, a warehouse, a prep center, a freight forwarder, any combination, or all of the above. Just as a note, if you want to ever store inventory at a vendor, it has to be marked as a warehouse or you cannot store inventory there in SoStocked -- so if it's a supplier and a warehouse, mark it as both. Prep center is just kind of for your own designation, same with a freight forwarder that doesn't give you any additional features.

Next, choose a color for your vendor and fill out all the contact information. The email address is going to be used on purchase orders or work orders as you move forward through SoStocked so that's important -- same with the mailing address.

If it is a warehouse, you can choose to have the same as the primary contact, or you can have a different address there.

Now, this is very important -- if you do have it assigned as a warehouse, you need to make sure that you turn on any marketplace for Amazon that you want this inventory to be activated. So for example, if you're selling in the US, Canada, and Mexico, turn all three of those on. If these are not turned on for the correct marketplaces, then they won't show up in the forecast because the forecast is looking at where do you have inventory, what inventory is available for this marketplace, what warehouses can you pull that inventory from -- and that is determined by this setting.

You can also put supplier blackout dates here, as well as the payment terms. We'll talk about lead times in a different video/article but that's going to be set up here -- whatever lead times you choose will be automatically assigned to every product that you assigned to this vendor.

Don't forget to click on "Save Changes" once you're done.

That's pretty much it -- so that's kind of a 1-2-3. First, make sure that you archive any old vendors. Then, you rename them so they make sense to you. Lastly, you assign the correct vendor type and any specifics inside of them.

Another Way to Update Your Vendor's Info

You can also do all this if you go to the Settings page, and click on "Bulk Export/Import".

You can download a list of all active products and vendors by selecting "Download Quick Export (active products)" from the drop-down menu. There's a vendor tab on this download and make sure you watch this video carefully.

On the vendor's tab, you can assign all that stuff in bulk and then just go down here and upload it. It will update every detail about your vendor in one quick upload.

How To Add New Vendor

If you want to create a new vendor, let's say some of your vendors are not here yet or you're just adding in a new 3PL 3rd-party fulfillment center or prep center something like that -- you can just up here, click the green "+" button, and select the Vendor button.

Choose what type of vendor it is -- whether it's a supplier, a warehouse, a prep center, a freight forwarder, any combination, or all of the above. As you can see, the default status is "Active". Next, give it a name (in this example, we'll name it "ABC Warehouse") and you can put additional information here. Then, choose the color for this vendor.

Now, the contact information. Just a note, if you put an email address in here, this will be the email address used when you're creating purchase orders or work orders so it's very important if you want that automatically to populate on your purchase orders or work orders. If it is a warehouse, you definitely need to either check this box or add the warehouse location.

If it is a warehouse just like we said in the last video, you need to make sure the marketplaces for Amazon are turned on or that inventory will not show up as available on the Forecast page. The factory address could be the same as the warehouse address.

Now, the supplier blackout dates. You do have the ability to put in blackout dates such as Chinese New Year or national holidays things like that. You should also add the payment terms, and then the lead time.

Put any notes to the supplier for PO or to the vendor for WO, click "Save Changes", and that will add that vendor to your list of vendors.