Buyer-specific product mappings

Buyers order using their own item numbers. Acme’s system calls your snowboard ACME-BOARD-9; your SKU is SNW-VID-01. Their purchase order says ACME-BOARD-9, every time, and nothing in your catalogue matches it.

A buyer-specific product mapping records what their code means, once.

Two ways to create one

You can teach a mapping while resolving an order, or set one up in advance from Mappings. They produce the same thing: there is no separate kind of “manual” mapping, and an order resolves against either identically.

Do it in advance when you already know a buyer’s codes — after a new customer sends their item list, say — and you would rather their first order arrive resolved than stop and ask.

From the Mappings screen

1. Go to Mappings and choose Create mapping.
2. Choose the buyer’s company and location.
3. Enter their item number and the unit they order in.
4. Choose the Shopify product with Choose product.
5. Set Shopify units per that unit — one for singles.
6. Save mapping.

The company, location and product are chosen from Shopify rather than typed, so a mapping cannot point at something that does not exist.

While resolving an order

1. Open a line that needs a product chosen.
2. Choose the Shopify product, then the variant.
3. If the line is ordered in cases or another multi-unit, enter how many Shopify units are in one.
4. Under Remember this match?, choose This buyer only.
5. Save the line.

The offer names the code, the unit and the variant it will remember, so you can see exactly what you are agreeing to before you save it.

What gets stored

Three things together:

• The buyer’s item code, as read from the document.
• The unit the line was ordered in.
• The Shopify variant, plus the conversion factor if there is one.

And it is held against the company location on the order.

Mappings belong to one buyer

This is the important part. A mapping applies only to the company location it was taught for.

If Acme’s SHARED-CODE-7 means one product and Northline’s SHARED-CODE-7 means another, both work correctly. Two customers reusing the same internal code for different goods is ordinary, and quietly shipping one customer’s product to the other because the strings matched would be an expensive, invisible mistake.

The same holds for two locations of one customer: a code mapped for Ottawa does not resolve for Toronto.

The unit is part of the mapping

A mapping taught for cases does not apply to a later order of the same code in singles. That is deliberate — the quantities mean different things, and inheriting a case multiplier would order twelve times too many.

If a buyer orders the same code in both units, you will be asked once for each, and end up with two mappings. See Units of measure (UOM) and pack sizes.

When a scan garbles the code

If a scanned code is nearly one you have mapped, the mapping is applied anyway and shown as Confirm the product you mapped before. You confirm it rather than re-teaching it, and the pack size you already agreed to comes with it.

Reviewing and removing

Mappings in the main navigation lists them under Company-specific mappings, grouped by buyer, with the customer item number, source unit, Shopify variant and conversion. Delete any that are wrong or out of date.

Removing a mapping does not touch orders already created — only what happens to the next one.