Browse your catalog from a purchase order

Browse products on a purchase order opens Stockroom's product picker - the quickest way to order across a supplier's whole range. This article covers what the picker shows, how to narrow it, and how to create a product from it. The other ways to add items (scanning, searching by name, suggestions) are in Creating and Sending Purchase Orders.

Browse your catalog. Click Browse products to open Stockroom's product picker and add several at once - tick a row, or type a quantity straight into it. To review a supplier's whole range at once, tick Select all above the list and every product the current filters match lands on the order at a quantity of 1, ready to look through - untick the rows you don't want and adjust the rest. It selects up to 1,000 items, and tells you if the filters matched more. Clicking a row only ever adds it, so a stray click can't undo your work - to take a row off, untick its checkbox in the Select column. A quantity you typed is remembered if you untick and tick the row again. Each row shows the supplier's own code for the item and the stock you hold at this order's destination, and lines arrive with SKU and current unit cost pre-filled. Picking a product the order already has adds it again, as a second line - see Line notes, supplier SKUs and repeated lines on a purchase order.

The filter row narrows what you are looking at: vendor (on a purchase order this opens already set to your supplier, and widening it is one click, because a distributor's order can carry other brands), product type, tag, ABC grade, Status, and Stock. Set Stock to Out of stock to see only what has run out at this order's destination - the quickest way to build a fill-the-gaps order from a supplier's range.

Every row carries the numbers behind the decision. Under the Available count you see what is already on the way and what the product has sold in your sales window (set under Settings → Reorder suggestions), and under the product name its own tags - the first three, with a +N more beside them that shows the rest when you hover it, or opens them in place when you tap it on a phone or tablet. To read the sold figure over a different window, use Sold in after the filters: the last 7 to 365 days, or Since a date, which opens on the date of your last order with this supplier - so you can see what has sold since you last bought from them.

Long lists load in pages. The picker shows 250 products at a time. If the supplier has more, a Load more button sits under the list and brings in the next 250, with a count beside it of how many are loaded so far - keep clicking to reach the end of a large catalog. Nothing is left out: quantities you have already typed stay put as more rows arrive, so you can work through a long list in passes. You can also narrow it with the filters or the search box first, which is usually quicker than paging when you know what you are after.

The item is not in Shopify yet? Create it without leaving the order: New product sits in the picker's footer, and when a search finds nothing the picker offers to create exactly what you typed. The dialog creates a real Shopify product - title, SKU, barcode, vendor, product type and cost - and adds it to the order in one step. Tick This product has variants to add up to three options (like Size or Color) with per-variant SKUs, barcodes, costs and quantities; each variant lands as its own line. Products are created as drafts, so they can be ordered, received and counted right away but stay off your sales channels until you tick Ready to sell (with a price) or finish the listing in Shopify.

Draft products can go on a purchase order. The picker opens on Active and draft, so a line you have not launched yet is there to order - which is the normal case when you are buying a season ahead and holding the products in draft until they can go on sale. Draft rows are marked Draft so you can tell them apart. Archived products are the one thing left out by default, since that is the "we stopped selling it" state - set Status to Archived or All statuses and they come back, marked the same way. Whatever you set Status to, the picker remembers it and opens there next time - so if your seasonal lines sit in draft all year and you would rather see only what is active, set it once. Ordering, receiving and stock updates all work the same whatever the product's status; Stockroom never changes it.

Telling near-identical products apart. The picker shows each item's barcode (UPC/EAN) beside its SKU, and you can search on either - so two items that share a name are still easy to tell apart. If you keep extra details in Shopify metafields - a season, a model year, a fabric - Stockroom shows those too. Stockroom lists your product and variant metafield definitions under Settings > Data & sync > Your Shopify metafields; turn on the ones you want and their values fill in over the next few minutes. Nothing is synced until you turn it on.