Before you can create and send purchase orders to your supplier(s), your must have received and imported an eCommerce catalog from your supplier.

How you receive this catalog depends on your supplier. You can receive this catalog either on a disk or CD, or as an attached file in an e-mail but in most cases your supplier will choose to make the eCommerce catalog available directly from the front page in Service Suite.

 Receiving the catalog from the front page in Service Suite.

The easiest way to receive eCommerce catalogs is via the front page in Service Suite. Before you can see and import the catalog from your supplier you must have received and registered the license file created by your supplier. If you do not have a license file, you can contact your supplier and request one.

When new eCommerce catalogs are available from your supplier(s) they will appear on the front page in Service Suite like this:

As the above illustration shows there is a new section in the information area titled: "New eCommerce catalogs". This section contains new eCommerce catalogs from you suppliers. Here you can get the newest eCommerce catalog from you supplier, by in this case clicking the link: "Unitix ApS. Updated the 31/08-2004 10:42". When this link is clicked the catalog will be retrieved and imported as explained in the section "Importing the eCommerce catalog" further below on this page.

 Receiving the catalog by e-mail.

If your supplier sends you the catalog by e-mail, you will receive an e-mail, which might look a bit like this:

The content of this e-mail is determined by your supplier, but the eCommerce catalog will always be attached to this e-mail. In order to make it as easy as possible to import the eCommerce catalog, all you have to do is to double-click the attached file. In some cases a warning dialog from your mail system will appear:

This dialog varies depending on your e-mail system, but in all cases you should select to open the file. When the file is opened to import of the eCommerce catalog will begin.

 Importing the eCommerce catalog.

No matter how you received the catalog, the import will be the same and look like this:

In this dialog you can see information's about this catalog. When you press the button: "Finish" the eCommerce catalog will be imported:

Now you just have to wait for the import to finish. When the eCommerce catalog has been imported in Service Suite, you can create and send purchase orders to your supplier.

If you have received the eCommerce catalog on disk or CD you just double-click the catalog, and it will be imported into Service Suite in the same way as described above.

How often your supplier(s) catalogs are updated depends on your supplier(s). Because Service Suite makes it easy to distribute and import these catalogs, new catalogs in most cases will frequently be available, in order to ensure that your installation of Service Suite is always updated with the newest products, prices and discounts from your supplier.

Now you can create new purchase orders and send those electronically to your supplier(s), which will receive those orders in exactly the way and format the supplier desires.