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Retail | Product Catalog: Onboarding Your Existing Shop Data

If you are already running your retail stores with individual, shop-level product catalog records, the onboarding wizard helps promote your existing data into a single, unified company catalog. The wizard automatically detects which store records represent the exact same product across multiple locations, allows you to review and confirm those groupings, and links everything together while preserving your original shop data.

Prerequisites

  • Access to the BLAZE Web Portal.
  • Existing shop-level inventory data ready to be consolidated.
  • Administrative permissions to manage company-level Product Catalog settings.

How to Access Onboarding

  1. Navigate to Products > Onboard in the main menu.
  2. Alternatively, if your company catalog is currently empty, click Start onboarding from the banner on the Products page ("Bring your shop products into the company catalog").

Step-by-Step Onboarding Process

The onboarding wizard guides you through a five-step consolidation workflow:

Step 1: Choose the Main Shop & Matching Strategy
  1. Select your Main Shop. When the same product exists in multiple stores, the main shop's name, SKU, brand, and category serve as the company baseline, while other stores track their distinct values as overrides. Click Use suggested if the system auto-identifies a recommended main shop.
  2. Select your preferred Grouping Key to define how the system identifies duplicate products across storefronts:
    • SKU (Strictest): Recommended when SKUs are centrally managed across all locations.
    • SKU + Brand (Default): Disambiguates reused SKUs across different vendors.
    • Name + Category + Brand: Loose matching; best used when SKUs diverge between locations.

 WARNING: Once matching begins in the next step, you cannot change your selected grouping key. 

Step 2: Confirm Category Groupings
  1. Review the category list. Categories sharing the same name are automatically grouped into a single company category.
  2. Filter through categories using the status tabs: All, Conflicts, or Unnamed.
    • Conflicts: Indicates grouped categories with differing settings. The anchor store's values take priority for the company category, while other stores retain their settings as overrides.
    • Unnamed: Assign a name to the category group or detach the unnamed shop category.
  3. Click Continue. The wizard creates the company category structure and displays a progress bar.
Step 3: Automated Product Matching

Product matching processes automatically in the background.

 NOTE: You can safely navigate away from this page while matching completes. Upon returning to the wizard, your results will be waiting in the review stage. 

Step 4: Review the Plan
  1. Review the generated plan. Each row represents a single company product along with its linked shop-level products.
  2. Inspect each row's Shop Count, Confidence Score, Decision ("Match → [existing product]" or "Create new"), and Why (matching signals like shared identifiers, matching SKUs, or name/brand similarity).
  3. Open any row's detail panel to make manual adjustments if needed:
    • Change the source shop data ("Use this shop's data").
    • Override a matching decision ("Match top candidate instead" or "Create new instead").
    • Re-link the item to a different match target ("Link group here").
Step 5: Apply Changes
  1. Click Apply. The system applies product links sequentially in the background.
  2. Once complete, a confirmation message appears: "Onboarding complete — Every shop product is now part of the company catalog. Your shop catalog is unchanged."

Safety & Cancellation Guidelines

  • Non-Destructive Operations: The wizard reads shop catalogs without modifying underlying shop records—it simply links existing shop products to new or existing company catalog products.
  • Canceling Onboarding: You can cancel at any time prior to clicking Apply by selecting Cancel onboarding. This discards the current plan without altering your shop catalogs, allowing you to re-run onboarding whenever you are ready.
  • Re-running Onboarding: If your organization is already onboarded, the system will display a notification: "This company is already onboarded".

WARNING: Re-running the wizard on an already onboarded account will generate a second duplicate catalog layer on top of your existing structure. Contact BLAZE Support if you need to completely reset your catalog structure.

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