Suppliers
How Inventory Mate suppliers relate to Shopify product vendors, and what you see on the Suppliers page.
Inventory Mate treats suppliers as first-class records: they belong to your shop, can hold contact details, default purchase-order settings, and tie into purchase orders and reporting. Shopify product vendors are a separate idea: they are the vendor strings on your products in Shopify Admin. The Suppliers page brings both together so you can work from one list.
Two ideas: Inventory Mate suppliers vs Shopify vendors
Inventory Mate suppliers
A supplier in Inventory Mate is a row stored for your shop. You can create suppliers manually or they can be created automatically from Shopify (see below). These records are what you pick on purchase orders, bulk flows, and anywhere the app asks for a supplier.
Manual suppliers are typically marked as such; you control name, address, contact fields, and defaults (payment terms, notes, currency, and similar fields).
Shopify product vendors
In Shopify, each product variant can have a Vendor (product vendor) value. Inventory Mate reads the distinct vendor names used across your catalog for the connected store. Those names represent who Shopify thinks supplies the product, not necessarily a full contact record in Inventory Mate.
So: Shopify answers “which vendor name is on this product?” Inventory Mate suppliers answer “who do we order from, with what contact and PO defaults?”
How they appear together on the Suppliers page
The list is a merged view:
- All Inventory Mate suppliers for the shop (including rows created from Shopify sync).
- Shopify vendor names that do not yet match any supplier by name (case-insensitive). Those may show as extra rows so you still see every vendor string in use in the catalog.
Rows that come only from Shopify (or that are linked to Shopify’s vendor concept) are labeled in the UI as Shopify vendor where applicable. Rows that exist only because Shopify has that name on products—but you have not yet created a full supplier record—may prompt you to add details in Inventory Mate when you edit or create purchase orders.
Keeping names in sync
Vendor spelling and casing on Shopify are treated as the source of truth for Shopify-linked rows. When Inventory Mate syncs, it can create or update supplier rows so they stay aligned with the vendor names currently on your products.
The first time you open the Suppliers page for a shop, the app may save many vendor-based rows at once. That initial sync can take a noticeable amount of time; the page shows a syncing message while this runs.
You can also use Sync from Shopify on the page to pull the latest vendor names on demand (subject to throttling so repeated loads stay fast). For exactly what that button does—including auto-link, overrides, and reconciliation—see Sync from Shopify (Suppliers).
If you change a vendor in Shopify
If you rename or change the product vendor in Shopify Admin, Inventory Mate will reflect that after the next sync. Old placeholder-style entries may disappear from the list once they no longer match any product vendor string.
What you can do on the page
- Search — Filter the table by name, contact fields, location, and linked product titles/SKUs (multi-word search is supported).
- Add Supplier — Create a manual supplier or complete details for a Shopify-driven row.
- Bulk import — Import or update suppliers from a spreadsheet where supported.
- Sync from Shopify — Refresh vendor names from Shopify and reconcile rows.
- Columns — Contact and location, Products (how catalog items map to that supplier or vendor string), and lead times derived from purchase order history where data exists.
For purchase orders and emails, see also Purchase Order Management and Automated Supplier Interactions.