Availability lists go out of date the moment they are sent. By the time a customer is looking at the spreadsheet you emailed Tuesday, half of it is wrong — and the ones who order from it anyway create the reconciliation work you were trying to avoid.
A catalog driven by the same data as everything else
Marketplace presents your product as a catalog customers can browse and search — with photos and descriptions, filtered down by the categories you have organised your products into. Because it runs on the same inventory as the rest of the platform, it cannot be stale.
What each customer sees
- Their own pricing, not a generic list price
- Indicative availability, so they know what is realistically there
- When something is out of stock, the date the next production lot is expected to be ready
That last one changes the conversation. "Out of stock" ends a sale; "ready the week of the fourteenth" starts a different one — and it comes straight from your production lots rather than someone’s estimate.
Configured to how you sell
Not every operation wants to publish everything. Pricing display can be turned off for growers who quote manually. Availability can be hidden. Batch dates can be suppressed. Availability figures are shown as a guide rather than a reservation — nothing is held until an order exists, and the catalog says so rather than implying otherwise.
Where this is going
We are working toward giving your customers more of what they need without a phone call, and the catalog is where that starts. Customers who want self-service ordering today can already have it — a scoped login onto the order screen, which is how one of the brokers we work with runs.