Creation of new suppliers and brands directly from Merlin Backoffice ® Flex

How to create brands and suppliers in PrestaShop before version 2.0.2

There are many cases, such as when creating new products, where you need to quickly add a new brand or supplier in PrestaShop.

Until now, this was only possible through the import tool, by including a column mapped to the supplier name or manufacturer no.

headings.

With this update, you'll be able to create and maintain suppliers (or wholesalers) and brands (or manufacturers) from lots of different places, without interrupting your work in progress.

New forms for creating and editing brands and suppliers

From version 2.0.2 of Merlin Backoffice ® Flex, two new creation and editing forms make their appearance.

They allow you not only to add entities but also to define or modify their properties such as summary, description, full address, meta fields...

For manufacturers, also known as brands:

And for suppliers:

When and how to create suppliers or manufacturers

These two forms can be accessed from various places in the interface, to meet different use cases.

When creating new products en masse

Note the presence of these four new buttons in the mass product creation form. A create button, indicated by the "+" sign, and an edit button, indicated by the "pen" symbol:

Both buttons open the same form, but the edit button additionally performs a database read to retrieve all existing info and pre-fill it. Whereas, of course, the "+" buttons create a new entity in the database.

When editing a product from the sheet tab

The same handy buttons can be found in the "Identity" sub-tab of the sheet tab:

Directly in the product table

To add a brand or supplier on the fly, without leaving the product edit line. Clicking on the drop-down arrow gives a list of partners already associated, but also now the option of adding one ("+ New" line):

From the "Suppliers"

tab

This tab is not new, it has existed for a long time already in Merlin Backoffice ®, allowing:

-to associate suppliers with products en masse

-define the default supplier with a single click on a large number of products

-create supplier references for products and variations

-to copy product supplier references into the supplier references of their declinations

-to filter suppliers

It was therefore logical to add a create button and a modify button to this interface:

In the import window

It's not uncommon during training sessions to realize, when launching the import of new products, that the "supplier" column is absent from the csv or Excel file, whereas it's important, even essential if the products have a supplier reference, to associate a default supplier with them. If this supplier is not already present in the database, you need to start by creating it.
Until now, you either had to modify the file to add the column, or go to the PrestaShop BO to add a supplier.

You can now do this directly with this new add button in step four: