Managing Your Products
Managing Your Products
In wallmarkets, the product catalog is not background setup. It is the foundation of every delivery, return, report, and conversation that depends on accurate operational detail.
If the catalog is vague, the rest of the system becomes vague with it.
That is why product setup is worth doing carefully, even if you only have a few items on day one.
What a good product record should do
A good product record should make three things easy:
- the person creating a delivery can choose the right item quickly
- the person reviewing a return can identify the item without guessing
- the dashboard and reports can group performance meaningfully later
That means the goal is not to fill every possible field. The goal is to make each record operationally clear.
The fields that matter most
When you add a product, focus on the details that keep downstream work clean.
Product name
Use a name that makes sense to the people actually handling deliveries and returns. "Milk" is too broad. "Whole Milk 1L" is operationally useful. The right level of detail usually includes pack size, format, or distinguishing variant if confusion is possible.
If two products can be mistaken for each other at a glance, the names are not good enough yet.
Weight
Weight matters because it shapes planning, total shipment understanding, and sometimes route decisions. Enter the weight in kilograms and keep the unit consistent across the whole catalog.
Do not mix unit logic in the product name and weight field inconsistently. A clean catalog makes later calculations much more trustworthy.
Price
Use the price you want deliveries and reporting to reflect going forward. Historical records should remain historical; the current product record should support future work cleanly.
Category
Categories are not about making the catalog look tidy. They help with filtering, grouping, and reading the business later. Choose categories your team will actually use in day-to-day work, not categories that only look impressive on paper.
For most suppliers, practical categories like Dairy, Frozen, Beverages, Produce, or Dry Goods are enough.
How to name products so the catalog scales
The easiest way to make a catalog painful is to let everyone describe products differently.
Pick a naming pattern early and keep it consistent. A simple pattern works well:
Product name + size/format + notable variant
Examples:
- Whole Milk 1L
- Greek Yogurt 500g
- Orange Juice 2L
- Salted Butter 200g
You do not need the naming system to be beautiful. You need it to survive real use by real people under time pressure.
When to use CSV import
If you already have a spreadsheet with more than a small handful of products, CSV import is usually the better path. Clean the data once, upload it, then review the result inside wallmarkets.
CSV import is especially useful when:
- your current catalog already exists elsewhere
- product names need one round of cleanup
- the team is tempted to retype everything manually
Manual entry is still fine for a very small starting catalog, but once repetition kicks in, bulk import usually prevents more mistakes than it creates.
The mistakes that cause trouble later
Vague names
If your product names rely on tribal knowledge, returns and reporting become harder immediately.
Inconsistent units
If some items are entered with careful weights and others are approximate, shipment totals stop being trustworthy.
Category sprawl
If the catalog ends up with fifteen categories when five would do, filtering becomes annoying and no one uses the structure properly.
Letting old products clutter active work
If a product is no longer actively delivered, mark it appropriately or clean it out of daily workflows. The delivery form should help the operator choose quickly, not force them to scan through dead catalog history.
What to review weekly
The product catalog deserves a short review cadence, especially early on.
Once a week, look for:
- duplicate or nearly duplicate names
- missing weights or inconsistent formatting
- categories that are no longer useful
- products that appear in returns too often to ignore
A ten-minute cleanup habit prevents the catalog from becoming the next spreadsheet problem.
How products connect to the rest of the system
Once the catalog is clean, a lot of other workflows improve automatically.
Delivery creation becomes faster because the right items are easier to find.
Return logging becomes less ambiguous because the receiving team and your office team are referring to the same product definitions.
Reporting becomes more believable because top products and return patterns are tied to records people actually trust.
That is the real payoff. Product management is not a catalog maintenance chore. It is the work that makes the rest of the platform readable.
Recommended next steps
Once your first products are in place, move to:
Those pages are where the product catalog starts proving its value.
Still need help?
Our support team is here to assist you.