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  4. Creating and maintaining manufacturers

Creating and maintaining manufacturers

In TRADElube a manufacturer is a record of its own and not a label on the product. It has its own texts per language, its own properties and its own channel mappings, and a product points at it instead of repeating its name. This guide creates a manufacturer, fills it and assigns it on the product. What every field means is under manufacturers (reference) and is not repeated here.

The order is not arbitrary: a product can only point at a manufacturer that already exists. So the manufacturers belong in place before the first import.

Prerequisites

  • The names of the brands your articles are carried under. The first step needs no more than that.
  • For the way into a connected system: a channel that has been set up. Whether your system keeps manufacturers as records of their own or expects only the brand name on the article is on its page under channels and tasks.

Detail view of a manufacturer with the Name field in the Common section and the language tabs of the Description section

Step by step

  1. Create the manufacturer. Open the Manufacturers navigation entry and choose New. In the Common section you fill in its single field, the Name. It is unique within the client and at the same time the value a connected system receives as the brand name. Save brings the record into being. Before that it appears in no list.

  2. Fill texts and language versions. Everything translatable sits in the Description section: Link for the address of the manufacturer's page, plus Short Description and Description. You create a further language version through the Insert button at the head of the section, and only from the second one do the language tabs appear. If your client runs a single language, the button is absent, because there is nothing to add.

  3. Fill the meta description as far as the shop shows it. The Meta Description subsection holds Meta Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords. They go along where the channel offers fields for them, and otherwise stay empty without consequence.

  4. Maintain your own properties. The Properties section exists only if there are any for manufacturers at all. That is exactly what they are for: a framework agreement or a minimum order value belongs on the brand and not on every article. How to create one is under configuring properties.

  5. Assign it on the product. In the product's Common section you pick the record in the Manufacturer field. The field may stay empty. With a file import the transfer plan takes care of it, and the Manufacturer row then points at a record that already exists, see importing products from a file.

  6. Take it into the connected system. Where your system keeps manufacturers as records of their own, there is a task for it, Manufacturers Upload on Shopware for instance. Let it run before the task uploading products: the product points at the manufacturer, and that one has to be in place on the other side already. Other systems take only the name along on the article, on Shopify in the Vendor row for instance, and there this step falls away.

Checking the result

  • The list under Manufacturers shows the name, and the Filter field finds it on a partial match.
  • On the product the manufacturer sits in the Common section, and the product list can be narrowed down to it through Filter By, group Field, condition Manufacturer.
  • After the execution the manufacturer carries its mapping in the Channels section, and the shop shows the brand with text and link.

Frequent pitfalls

  • The import does not find the manufacturer. A row whose manufacturer does not exist in TRADElube fails with a named message, and the article is not created. Create the brands beforehand, as in step 1, by hand or through the custom channel's Manufacturers Import task.
  • Two spellings of the same brand. The name is unique, but "NORDLACK" and "Nordlack" are two records, and the shop then carries two brands. Settle the spelling once in step 1, before the first file runs.
  • A deleted manufacturer takes no products down with it. The articles are kept in full, only their Manufacturer field from step 5 is cleared. TRADElube marks them as changed while doing so, so the old name does not stay behind in the connected system.
  • The text arrives, the link does not. Link is an entry of the language version from step 2. Whoever creates the English version and leaves it empty there gets a brand without an address in the English shop.

Further reading