Supplier portal
How to invite a supplier to capture and maintain only the products of their brands, and what they see when they sign in.
Video transcript
In this video, you'll invite a supplier to enter their brand's products.
Your supplier joins your organization as an editor, limited to their brands.
Enter their email, choose Editor, check “Limit to their brands” and pick theirs.
They get the invitation, and here you see it pending: supplier, one brand.
You decide which attributes they fill in: those in a group you mark “Filled in by the supplier”…
…and you put the attributes that belong to them in that group.
And on your store's channel, check “Counts toward supplier requirements”, so they know what's missing.
This is what your supplier sees: a portal with their brand, without credits, channels or your team.
They only see their brand's products, and how complete they are.
On each record they see what your store asks for: their part and what you complete.
They edit the attributes in their group; the rest show a lock.
New products don't go straight in: they're sent for validation.
They upload their file and review what would happen…
…and send it. Nothing exists in your catalog until you approve it.
You review it in Validation, with what would happen on approval.
If everything checks out, approve it: the products go into your catalog.
In the next video, your supplier adds a product step by step.
What the portal is
A supplier joins your organization as a viewer or editor limited to their brands. They see and edit only those brands' products, with the history and their name on every change; they don't spend credits, import or download, and they don't see other suppliers.
It isn't a separate product: it's your organization's same account, with a shorter menu.
Inviting a supplier
In Account → Team, type their email, choose «Editor» (or «Viewer» if they should only look), tick «Limit to their brands» and pick their brands with the search box. They join already limited: there is no moment in which they see the whole catalog.
The invitation email tells them which brands it covers. In the list of pending invitations you'll see «Supplier · N brands».
What the supplier sees
A short menu: Home, with counts for their brands and their recent uploads; My products, with the grid if they are an editor; Send products and My uploads. The top says “Supplier portal”. They don't see credits, team, settings, channels, downloads, batches or analytics.
Their notifications only bring what's meant for them (a mention, an assigned task); organization-wide notices, such as low balance, don't reach them. Of the tasks, they only see their own —assigned to them or created by them— and they can assign one to your team; your team's internal tasks on their brands don't reach them.
Nor can they reach them by their address: opening one of those screens takes them back to their home. On a product page they don't see the Photo session, the imported data you built your catalog with, or your channels, and their account only shows their profile, their password and the «Submission returned» notice.
On a product page they comment in the «With the supplier» thread: they don't see your notes in the «Internal» one. If a brand has more than one supplier, they share that thread and see the email of whoever writes.
On a product page they see «requirements» with your organization's name: what their products are missing for the channels you check «Counts toward supplier requirements», without the channel's name or its columns. First what's theirs to fill in, with a link to where it's filled in; then what you complete.
If your organization has a logo (Settings → Organization), the supplier sees it in the header of their portal, next to your organization's name. Your team sees no change: for you, Bruxel stays Bruxel.
What the supplier writes
They edit the base data of their products (name, category, family and images) and, among attributes, only those in the groups you check «Filled in by the supplier» in Attributes → Attribute groups. An attribute in another group, or with no group, shows a lock saying you fill it in.
Checking a group is an administrator's call: it decides what every supplier in the organization writes. To give a single supplier other groups, add them to their «Scope» in Team; those take precedence over the brand.
Sending new products
A supplier doesn't create products directly: they send them for validation from “Send products”, in two ways. “One product” opens the step-by-step form (below); “Several products” downloads their department's template in Excel (or CSV), fills it in and uploads it, up to 5,000 rows.
A row with a brand that isn't theirs, or with a SKU that already exists outside their scope, isn't sent: the screen marks it with its row number and the submission waits until it's fixed. If the supplier has a single brand and the file has no brand column, theirs is used.
“Review” checks each product in the file with the same rules as adding one —an individual product, or a parent with its variants— and says what goes in, what goes in with a warning and what doesn't, with its row and column. What doesn't go in can be downloaded with “Download rows with errors”, in the same format and with the reason; fix it and upload it again. You can send only the valid rows, or a pilot first: the first complete families until they add up to the rows you choose.
Approving a template file does the same as approving a single new product: the products get their subcategory and their SAP category, inherit the family, the parent gets its axis and new shades are created. A file with more than 500 rows is approved in the background.
The new product, step by step
The steps come from what your organization already sets up: general data, categorization, variants, one step for each group you mark “Filled in by the supplier”, content and images, and the review. Which fields are asked for, which are hidden and which Bruxel fills in by itself is decided by each attribute's rules; the order and the blocks are adjusted in Settings → Product onboarding form.
It saves itself while the supplier types and when they change steps, as a draft only whoever started it can see. If they close the tab halfway, they pick it up from “My uploads” → “Continue”, at the step where they left off.
On the right, “How it will look” says what your system will receive —the structure, the family and its variants, and the data Bruxel fills in by itself, such as the material type or the article group—, and “Live review” lists what stops it from being sent and what's worth reviewing, each with “Go to step”.
In “Content and images” they enter the store texts you ask for in the product onboarding form and upload photos to your library, or pick ones they already uploaded: the main one, additional ones and, if you ask with a question such as “Does it have a swatch?”, the swatch or the smoosh. In a family with variants, each variant gets its own.
In “Review” they see every step with what's pending and a summary of what they entered, with “Edit”. “Send for validation” becomes available when nothing stops it; whatever is missing for the channels you mark as requirements is sent as a warning.
Reviewing a submission
Submissions wait in My products → Validation, and the home page says how many there are. Approving is for operators and above and runs the usual import, with what the supplier can touch that day: if the catalog changed since they sent it, whatever no longer fits is skipped and counted.
Returning asks for a reason. The supplier gets the notice in the bell and by email, and reads the full reason in My uploads; fixing it means sending again.
A new product sent through the form also shows “How it will look” and, channel by channel, whether the product comes out ready for each requirements channel. Approving it runs the same import and, in the same operation, assigns its categories, inherits the family, sets the axes of a new family and links its images.
A file with more than 500 rows is approved in the background: the submission shows “Approving”, with its progress in view, and goes in whole within a few minutes. Meanwhile it can't be returned or withdrawn. If something fails, nothing goes in: it goes back to the queue with the reason, and whoever approved it gets a notice.
My uploads
Every submission with its status: awaiting review, approving (a large file going in in the background), approved (with how many products entered), returned (with the reason) or withdrawn. While it awaits review, whoever sent it can withdraw it.
Their new-product drafts go on top, with “Continue” and “Discard”. A new product that was returned or withdrawn is picked up with “Fix and resubmit”: a new draft with everything they entered.
The journey of a load
In My uploads, “View journey” shows where each upload is: sent, reviewed (with the reason, if it was returned), imported and, once it's in, its listings, their publication and their delivery. A supplier only sees the products that are in their brands today.
“Download skipped rows” gets, as a CSV, the rows of the upload that don't go in —no SKU, no name or outside their scope—, with the row number and the reason, to fix them and send them again. The scope ones are calculated against today's catalog.
Changing or removing access
Their brands are changed later from the person's row, with «Scope». If you raise their role to operator or above, they're no longer limited and see the full menu.