Vendors

Overview

While this article covers vendors, you should know that vendors and manufacturers function in a nearly identical way.  Vendors are meant to help you define and classify a product as being distributed by a specific entity.  The vendors are used in the drill down view, search results, and for drop shipping.  So they can be a key ingredient to you customer service and product discovery strategies.

Requirements

The following prerequisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

  • Have access to your Hotcakes store administration

Getting Started

There are no necessary tasks required prior to working with this article.

Vendors

Vendors are found in the People menu.

You'll notice that there won't be any vendors available at first.  You'll need to create at least one before the listing will begin to appear.  

You can add a vendor using the right panel.  Just click the New Vendor button.  You can also search for vendors here.  The search is discussed in more detail below.

When you create or edit a vendor, you'll have minimal required fields.  In fact, all that's really required is the name.

Setting Name Description
Name This is the name of the vendor as you'd like for it to appear to yourself and the customers on your site.
E-Mail Address If you're using the drop ship functionality with vendors, then be sure to enter the e-mail address where your vendor wishes to receive new order notifications.
Drop Shop E-Mail Template This is the e-mail template that will be used to send the drop ship notification that the vendor will receive.
Address Fields These address fields are standard, resembling all other address field groups throughout the administration area.  Use these fields to enter the address where products will be sent from, but only if you're planning to use drop shipping with vendors.

Click Save Changes to save your settings.

Vendor Search

The vendor search is fairly flexible.  It allows you to enter a keyword that will then be used as a partial search.  You'll end up seeing all vendors returned that at least partially match anything in the name or e-mail address properties of any vendor.  For example, if you enter the term "ample," vendors matching "ample," and "example" in either the name or e-mail address will be returned.  

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