Adding products to a purchase order: search limited to the supplier

A purchase order is only as good as the lines on it, and the lines come from a search box. On a draft PO in Restock Ops that box has one job: find the variant you mean, from the supplier you are ordering from, in as few keystrokes as possible, and refuse to find the ones you should not be ordering from them. This post explains what the search matches, why it narrows itself to the supplier's vendors, how a barcode scanner fits in, what the labels next to each result mean, and the places where the search deliberately behaves differently.

None of this is hidden behaviour. It is written down here because the two questions we get most about purchase orders are why did a product not show up and why did a product show up twice, and both have short answers once you know how the box works.

What a search term matches

Type at least two characters and, after a short pause so the app is not searching on every keystroke, the term is sent to Shopify as a single product variant search. One term is matched four ways at once: against the start of the variant SKU, against the barcode exactly, against the variant title anywhere in it, and against the product title anywhere in it. The results are whichever variants match any of those.

The SKU match is a prefix match on purpose. If your SKUs are structured, say BLK-TEE-S, BLK-TEE-M, BLK-TEE-L, typing BLK-TEE lists the three sizes together and nothing else, which is how most people think about a product when they order it. Typing TEE alone will not find them, because TEE is not how the SKU starts; type the product name instead and the title match picks them up.

The barcode match is exact. A partial barcode finds nothing, which is the right behaviour for a field whose only sensible input is a complete scan. The two title matches are substring matches, so a word from the middle of a product name works, and the search is not case sensitive. Shopify's own search syntax handles all of this; the app builds the query, escapes anything in your term that the syntax would otherwise treat as an operator, and asks for up to 25 variants.

Why the results stop at the supplier's vendors

Each supplier in Restock Ops has a Vendor associations section on its page, with a list of your Shopify product vendors and a tick next to the ones this supplier can deliver. When you search on a purchase order for that supplier, the app adds a second condition to the Shopify query: the variant's product must belong to one of the ticked vendors. The placeholder in the search box tells you this is happening; it reads Search Acme, Globex products by title, SKU or barcode rather than the generic Search products.

The point is to make the wrong line hard to add. A supplier who distributes two brands should not end up with a third brand on their PO because the SKU prefixes happened to collide, and a buyer who is new to the catalogue should not need to know which vendor belongs to whom. The vendor list does that work once, at setup, and every PO benefits.

A supplier with no vendors ticked has no restriction. Their search covers the whole catalogue, and the placeholder says so. This is the right setting for a general wholesaler who can source anything, and the wrong setting for everyone else, so if a product that clearly belongs to a supplier is not showing up on their PO, the first thing to check is whether its vendor is ticked on the supplier page. The vendor list itself comes from Shopify, up to 250 distinct vendor names, so a vendor spelled two ways in your products appears twice and needs ticking twice.

Reading the results

Each result shows the product title, the variant title, the SKU and the vendor, so the same product from two vendors is distinguishable at a glance. Two notes can appear after a result. The first is (on PO), shown greyed out and not selectable: this variant is already a line on the purchase order you are editing, and adding it again would create a duplicate line rather than increasing the quantity. Edit the existing line instead. The second is (inventory not tracked): the variant exists and you can add it, but Shopify is not tracking its stock, so receiving the PO will not change an on-hand number anywhere. Usually this means the variant was set up without inventory tracking and wants fixing in Shopify before the goods arrive.

Tick one or more results and the button reads Add 3 to PO, or whatever the count is. If the search found exactly the right set, Add all results takes everything in the list in one click, which is the quick way to put every size of a product on the order. If the term matches more than 25 variants, only the first 25 are shown; make the term longer rather than scrolling, since a SKU prefix one character longer usually cuts the list to what you wanted.

Scanning instead of typing

A USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner behaves like a keyboard: it types the barcode and then presses Enter. The search box is built for that. The typed barcode triggers the search like any other term, the exact barcode match finds the one variant, and the Enter key, when there is exactly one result, adds it to the PO immediately. Scan, line added, scan, line added, with the cursor staying in the box.

If the scan matches more than one variant, which happens when two variants share a barcode by mistake, Enter does nothing and the results stay on screen for you to pick from. If it matches none, the box says No products match, and the usual causes are a barcode that was never entered on the variant in Shopify, or a product whose vendor is not ticked for this supplier. The same vendor restriction that keeps wrong lines off the PO also applies to scans, which surprises people the first time: the box is not broken, the supplier simply cannot deliver that brand.

Where the search is deliberately different

The same search exists in two other places, and in neither of them is it restricted by supplier. The reorder report lets you search the whole catalogue because the question there is what needs ordering, not who from; the supplier is chosen per row afterwards, and Create draft PO groups the rows by it. Stocktakes search the whole catalogue because you count what is on the shelf, whoever supplied it. Only the purchase order narrows the list, because the purchase order is the one document that is addressed to a single supplier.

Adding a line through the search gives you a quantity of one and the variant's details, and from there every field is editable until you mark the PO as ordered: quantity, supplier SKU, unit cost and tax. The search gets the right variant on the page; the line is where you decide how many and at what price, and receiving later records what actually turned up against it.

A setup worth doing once

If your purchase orders are slow to build, the fix is usually on the supplier page rather than on the PO. Tick the vendors each supplier can deliver, make sure every variant you reorder has a barcode entered in Shopify so a scanner finds it in one go, and keep SKU prefixes consistent so a product's variants come up together. With those three in place a twenty-line order is a minute of scanning, and the search box does the remembering about who sells what.

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