Managing the Inventory Catalog in the Customer Portal: General Information

With the inventory catalog functionality in the MYOB Acumatica Customer Portal, you provide your customers with access to the products and services that your company sells. You use your MYOB Acumatica instance to create the catalog and manage the product and service descriptions and images. In the Customer Portal, your customers then can add the products and services in the catalog to the cart and create orders.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will do the following:

  • Develop an understanding of the tasks that must be performed for the configuration of the inventory catalog
  • Configure order management in the Customer Portal
  • Update descriptions and images for inventory items included in the catalog
  • Create sales categories for the inventory catalog
  • Manage sales categories for inventory items
  • View the inventory items in the catalog and add an item to the cart in the Customer Portal

Applicable Scenarios

You may need to configure the order management and the inventory catalog in the Customer Portal in the following cases:
  • You want to provide your customers with online and up-to-date access to the catalog of products or services that your company sells.
  • You want to receive orders that customers create in the Customer Portal.

Workflow of the Configuration of the Inventory Catalog in the Customer Portal

To prepare the system for customers to use the inventory catalog and place orders in the Customer Portal, you perform the following general steps:
  1. You perform the initial configuration of the Customer Portal. For details, see Configuring the Customer Portal: General Information.
  2. You set up access for users to the Customer Portal. For details, see Managing Access to the Customer Portal: General Information.
  3. In MYOB Acumatica, on the Enable/Disable Features (CS100000) form, you enable the following features:
    • Customer Portal
    • B2B Ordering
    • Financials on Portal
  4. In MYOB Acumatica, on the Contact Classes (CR206000) form, you make sure that the needed contact classes have been created. For the contact classes that should be available for selection to users in the Customer Portal, the Internal check box in the Summary area of the form must be cleared.
  5. In MYOB Acumatica, on the Business Account Classes (CR208000) form, you make sure that the needed business account classes have been created. For the business account classes that should be available for selection to customer administrators in the Customer Portal, the Internal check box in the Summary area of the form must be cleared.
  6. In MYOB Acumatica, you configure order management with inventory, as described in Order Management with Inventory.
  7. In the Customer Portal, on the B2B Ordering Settings tab of the Portal Preferences (SP800000) form, you specify the settings for order management, as illustrated in Managing the Inventory Catalog in the Customer Portal: Implementation Activity.
  8. In the Customer Portal, you create a catalog of products and services that will be available for ordering to the customers by adding items for sale to the catalog, as described in the following sections and as illustrated in Managing the Inventory Catalog in the Customer Portal: Implementation Activity.

Sales Categories of Inventory Items

On the Item Sales Categories (IN204060) form, you can create a hierarchical structure of sales categories that will be available for selection to the Customer Portal users on the Catalog (SP700000) form. To make the catalog structure easy to navigate, you can add new sales categories and subcategories and delete old ones. In the Category box of the Catalog (SP700000) form, a portal user can click the magnifier button to view the catalog structure, select a sales category, and view inventory items in the selected sales category.

Creation of the Catalog of Products and Services in the Customer Portal

With order management in the Customer Portal, you add items for sale (which have been created in MYOB Acumatica) to the catalog in the Customer Portal. These items for sale are inventory items. You can add to the catalog both stock items created on the Stock Items (IN202500) form and non-stock items created on the Non-Stock Items (IN202000) form. In MYOB Acumatica, on the Item Sales Categories (IN204060) form, you create sales categories for inventory items and use these categories to classify the products and services that your company sells. (For example, categories could use such phrases as T-Shirts, Spare Car Parts, Laptops, Repair of Washing Machines, or Webinars.) Then in the Customer Portal, you add to the categories items for sale, which will be available in the catalog on the Catalog (SP700000) form.

Attention: Inventory items that do not have a sales category are not displayed in the catalog on the Catalog (SP700000) form in the Customer Portal and are unavailable for selection to the portal users.

For more details on managing inventory items, see Inventory Management.

Descriptions and Images of Inventory Items

In MYOB Acumatica, an inventory item, stock or non-stock, has basic settings, such as its identifier, description, image, price, cost, unit of measure (UOM), default warehouse, and default vendor information. On the Catalog (SP700000) form, a portal user can view the quantity, description, price, discount, and warehouse for each item. The user can click an item and in the Item Details dialog box, which opens, view additional item settings, such as the image and any attributes of the inventory item.