Purchase Master Data: Merchants, Vendors and Products for Purchasing

The three lists every purchase order is built from: vendors you maintain in Purchase, plus the merchant list and the product catalog that Purchase shares with OMS and WMS and shows read-only.

A purchase order needs three things before its first line can be written: who you buy from (a vendor), what you buy (products) and — if you are a 3PL buying on behalf of a cargo owner — whose goods they will be (a merchant). Purchase gives each of them a page under Purchase → Merchants, Purchase → Vendors and Purchase → Products. Only the vendor list is maintained inside Purchase itself; the merchant list and the product catalog are shared master data — the same records OMS and WMS use — so Purchase shows them read-only and you maintain each fact exactly once, in the place that owns it.

Vendors: the list you maintain here#

1. Go to Purchase → Vendors and click New vendor. The Name is the only field that must be filled in; the code can be left blank if you do not use your own vendor codes.
2. Fill in the contact name, phone and email, plus the address and city — this is the supplier contact your buyers will look up later.
3. Fill in the PO email: the mailbox that should receive this vendor’s purchase orders. When you email a PO to the supplier from the PO page, this address is the default recipient (falling back to the contact email if it is empty).
4. Pick the payment term (Prepaid, Net 30, Net 60 or COD) and, if this vendor usually ships with one carrier, set the preferred carrier — new ASNs for this vendor start with that carrier already filled in.
5. Save. To change a vendor later, find it in the list (search by code or name) and click Edit. Unchecking Active retires the vendor: an inactive vendor cannot be picked on a new PO, but existing POs are untouched.

The vendor list is shared by the whole tenant — Purchase and WMS draw on the same vendor records, so a vendor you add here is the same vendor the warehouse side sees. There is one vendor record per supplier; fix a phone number once and it is fixed everywhere.

Merchants: the 3PL cargo-owner list (read-only here)#

• Purchase → Merchants shows on 3PL organizations: code, name, contact (name and phone) and status for every merchant. It is a viewing page — there is no New or Edit button on it.
• These records are the shared client master — the same merchants OMS and WMS work with. They are maintained in the merchant master data in Master Data, not in Purchase; change a merchant there and this page (and every other app) sees the same record.
• Why the list matters for buying: on a 3PL organization, a new PO must name the merchant the goods belong to. This page is where you check the merchant’s exact code and name — and whether it is still active — before you create the PO in Purchase → Orders.
• Use the search box to find a merchant by code or name; the list shows up to 200 records at a time.

Products: the shared catalog (read-only here)#

• Purchase → Products lists the product catalog as three plain columns — SKU, name and unit of measure (UOM) — with a search box for SKU or name. Like the merchant page, it is read-only: no New or Edit button.
• The catalog is the tenant’s shared product master — the same products OMS sells and WMS stores. Products are created and maintained in Master Data → Products; a product fixed there is fixed for Purchase too, with no second copy to keep in sync.
• On this page you only look products up. The actual picking happens where the buying happens: on the new-PO page (Purchase → Orders → New), you choose products from this same catalog straight into the PO lines, with quantities and unit prices.

Which list lives where — the summary#

Keeping the three lists healthy#

• Retire, do not delete: when a supplier stops working with you, uncheck Active on the vendor instead of trying to work around it — the vendor disappears from new POs, and every past PO keeps pointing at the real record.
• One record per real-world party: before creating a vendor, search the list by name — a second record for the same supplier splits your PO history, payment terms and contact details across two places.
• Fix shared data at the source: a wrong product name or a wrong merchant contact is never fixed in Purchase — go to Master Data, fix it once there, and OMS, WMS and Purchase all pick up the same correction.

Docklify features used in this article#

• Vendor master data with create / edit, PO email, payment terms, preferred carrier and Active switch — Purchase → Vendors (/purchase/vendors)
• Merchant list for 3PL (read-only view of the shared client master) — Purchase → Merchants (/purchase/merchants)
• Product catalog lookup (SKU / name / UOM, read-only view of the shared product master) — Purchase → Products (/purchase/products)
• Picking products from the catalog into PO lines, with the vendor (and merchant for 3PL) on the header — Purchase → Orders → New