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Supplier onboarding

Invite a supplier to submit product data through a scoped link; map, validate, and import it into your catalogue.

Supplier onboarding lets a buyer (PIC) bring a supplier's product data into PIE without the supplier needing a full account first. The buyer sends a scoped link, the supplier submits, and — on approval — real products land in the buyer's granted catalogue.

The model

Behind the scenes, PIE uses a managed shadow producer organisation plus an auto-grant: an unauthenticated supplier submits data through a scoped token; approval creates or updates real products in a supplier org and grants the buyer access to them. This preserves the producer-produces / buyer-reads model even for suppliers who are new to the platform.

Creating a request

As a pic_admin, create an onboarding request. You can pin a quality profile (your own, own-org, active) that the submission must satisfy. The gate is fail-closed: a pinned profile that is missing or inactive rejects the request, and a pinned profile always blocks on mandatory failures regardless of its own publish-gate flag. Send the supplier the scoped link.

Field mapping and transforms

Suppliers rarely send data in your exact shape. The onboarding field mapping maps their columns to your target attributes, and can run executable transforms — the same safe, closed-operation transform set used by syndication (map, split, parse number, unit convert, …). A mapping entry is either a legacy display-only AI hint (never executed) or an executable pipeline.

Preview a mapping before you commit it with the dry-run preview endpoint. On approve, mapping is all-or-nothing: any transform failure aborts the whole import with a row-addressed error, so you never get a silently-wrong product.

AI-assisted mapping

The field-mapping step can use AI to suggest mappings. Buyers configure their own AI provider settings (BYOK), so the suggestions run on the buyer's keys. On Buyer Team and above, platform-funded AI credits can be used instead; once the monthly allowance is used the app warns and points to your own key, and does not stop the mapping. Buyer Free has no platform AI, so automatic mapping there needs your own key (otherwise the request is refused with PLAN_UPGRADE_REQUIRED); manual mapping and saved mapping templates work on every plan. See the AI guide.

Limits

The number of active onboarding requests you can have open, and the number of connected suppliers, come from your plan. A supplier you onboard counts as connected once approved. Reaching the limit never stops a supplier from finishing a request you already opened; it limits new direct connections. See Producing and buying on one account.

Workflow-gated imports

If the target supplier org is non-managed and has an active product workflow, the import creates products as drafts and starts the workflow as a system action, so the supplier's publish gate governs the rest. Managed shadow orgs skip gating. The buyer only sees whether the import was gated — the supplier's internal workflow configuration is not surfaced.

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