Ordering and supplier portals
Ordering and supplier portals
A supplier’s Settings tab has two sections, General and Ordering. On a narrow screen they are a drop-down at the top.
General holds the supplier’s website. Twelfth looks it up for you; if it found the wrong one, Change it, or use Wrong website? to look again. Your choice overrides the lookup for the whole workspace. The website gives the supplier its icon across the app.
Ordering records how your team places orders with this supplier. What you save here is what How to order on the Facts tab shows.
Setting how to order
- Ordering methods: any of Portal, Email, Spreadsheet, Purchase Order, Allocations and One Drop - No Reorder.
- Buyer: the person in your workspace who orders from this supplier.
- Portal URL: only asked for when Portal is one of the methods. It must start with
https://. - Ordering instructions (optional): anything the next person needs, such as “email the order to the rep and copy the warehouse”.
Save ordering details saves them. Once saved, the section folds to a single line with Edit.
Supplier portal connection
Where your workspace has it, choosing Portal as a method adds a supplier portal connection. Twelfth signs in to the supplier’s B2B website on your behalf to check that the sign-in works, read their catalogue, and prepare a cart for you to review.
The connection is set up and managed by Twelfth with you. What you see is its status:
- Connected, Checking, Needs attention or Being set up;
- when it was last checked;
- the products Twelfth has read from the portal.
What it can never do
Ordering through a portal connection is always disabled. The connection can read the portal and add lines to the supplier’s cart for you to review. It cannot check out, submit an order or place one, and a successful sign-in never changes that. You place the order yourself, on the supplier’s website.
Further rules keep a cart change safe:
- Twelfth changes a cart only after it has read that cart successfully, for the same account, within the last 30 minutes.
- It only adds missing quantities. It never lowers a quantity, removes a line, or checks out.
- A cart build stops after 5 minutes and is never retried by itself. If one is cancelled part-way, some lines may already be in the supplier’s cart; review the cart on their site.
Portal passwords are encrypted and write-only: once saved, they cannot be shown again on the page, only replaced or removed. Removing a saved connection does not undo anything already added to a supplier’s cart.
When a supplier limits access
Some supplier sites rate-limit or challenge automated sign-ins. When that happens the connection shows Needs attention with the reason, and new checks pause for 15 minutes before trying again. Drafts and products already captured stay available while it is paused. If it keeps happening, the supplier may need to allow Twelfth’s access on their side.
The steps behind the connection
For the Twelfth team member setting a connection up, the page shows the full workflow:
- Connection details: the portal URL, username or customer code, and password. Save and test connection checks the sign-in.
- Sign-in verified: when the last check passed. A test sign-in leaves only a temporary copy that expires within 15 minutes.
- Products and buying draft:
- Find products: capture a product page from the portal (read-only, no cart changes), check the product, variant and pack, then save it to a draft.
- Draft: up to 20 lines, saved in Twelfth. Editing the draft does not touch the supplier’s cart. Build supplier cart adds the draft to the cart, under the rules above.
- Cart review: Read supplier cart reads the cart back and compares it with the draft line by line, with a screenshot to review.
Connection activity lists the 10 most recent checks, who ran each, and each step with a screenshot. Screenshots are masked and kept for 30 days; after that the step is kept without its screenshot.