Products & services
The catalog behind your invoices, estimates, and payment links – built for retail and service businesses.
Your product catalog
Products & services (Accept Payments → Products & services) is the one catalog behind everything you bill for. Add an item once and it appears in the line-item picker on invoices, estimates, and payment links. Price a thing once and every tool agrees on it.
An item can be a product, a service, a digital good, a bundle that rings several components at once, or a variable item that generates a child for each size or colour. A service works exactly like a product without stock – "Consultation, 1 hour" needs a price, not a quantity on hand.
The editor is organised into tabs so you only look at what your business actually needs. A dental practice fills in General and Pricing and is finished. A liquor store works through all of them. The Stock tab disappears entirely for anything that does not track stock, so you are never asked a warehouse question about a consulting hour.
- 1Click New item and give it a name, a SKU (or leave it blank and one is generated), and a description.
- 2Set how it is sold: Each, or by Weight for a deli or produce scale item.
- 3Classify it: Department, Category, Brand, and a Default vendor.
- 4Move through Pricing, Identifiers & Barcodes, and Stock as needed, then Save.
Save sits at the top right and stays there on every tab, so you never have to scroll to the bottom of a long form to finish.
Departments, categories, brands & vendors
Classification used to be free text, which is how a catalog ends up holding "Beverages", "beverages", and "Bevrages" as three different things. Each of these is now a real list you pick from: Department (Liquor, Grocery), Category (Red Wine, which can sit under a parent like Wine), Brand, and Default vendor.
You do not have to set these lists up in advance. Click the + beside any picker, type the name, press Enter, and it is created and selected on the spot – no leaving a half-filled item to go find a settings page. Type the same name twice and it reuses the existing entry rather than making a duplicate.
Consistent classification is what makes everything downstream work: filtering the catalog, reading a margin report by department, and knowing who to reorder from.
- 1Pick a Department, Category, Brand, and Default vendor – or click + to create one as you go.
- 2Tick Taxable, and Price includes tax when your shelf price already has tax baked in.
- 3Tick Available online for anything you sell through an online channel.
- 4Leave Track inventory on for physical goods; turn it off for services and anything that should never be blocked as out of stock.
Pricing, cost & scheduled price changes
The List price is what a card pays. If you run dual pricing you can also set an exact Cash price on the item; leave it blank and your account-wide dual-pricing rate is used instead. Setting it per item is how you pin a clean shelf price rather than a derived one – a $9.99 that has to read $9.75 in cash.
Three costs are tracked, because retail genuinely needs all three: Vendor cost is what you are billed, Average cost is the weighted average of the stock you are holding, and Last cost is what the most recent delivery actually cost. Your live margin is shown as you type.
A markup rule lets a price follow cost instead of being retyped: choose which cost to work from, whether the markup is a percentage or a flat amount, and the value.
Scheduled price changes let you set tomorrow's price today. Enter the new price and an effective date, and it applies automatically on that date – before the store opens, without anyone remembering to do it.
A Minimum price on the Identifiers tab acts as a floor, so a discount or a markup rule can never take an item below what you are willing to sell it for.
SKU, UPC, PLU & barcodes
Retail uses several codes for the same item and they are not interchangeable. The SKU is your own internal number. The UPC is the barcode printed on the package. The PLU is the short code a cashier keys for loose produce. The Vendor item # is what your supplier calls it when you reorder.
One item can also answer to several barcodes. A case, an old label, and a distributor's own code can all be added under Alternate barcodes, each with the quantity that scan represents – so scanning a case of twelve adds twelve, not one.
Selling to business, corporate, or government cards? The Level III block on this tab (product code, commodity code, unit of measure) fills itself in from the item's name and description, and you can override any of it. When those fields are set, qualifying transactions pass enhanced line-item data, which can mean lower interchange on eligible commercial cards.
Stock, reordering & shelf locations
Turn on Track inventory and Merchant360 keeps a live quantity on hand. Every sale decrements it, and each change is written to a movement ledger, so on-hand is always reconstructable rather than a number someone typed.
Four levels drive reordering, and they answer different questions. Low level is the point at which the item is flagged for reorder. Reorder qty is how many you buy when it is. Min order qty is your vendor's minimum. Safe qty is the cushion you never want to drop below.
Shelf / bin records where the item physically lives, so whoever is picking or counting can find it.
The Stock tab only appears for items that track stock. A service or a digital good never shows it.
- 1Turn on Track inventory on the General tab.
- 2Set the quantity on hand, and the Low level that should flag a reorder.
- 3Add Reorder qty, Min order qty, and Safe qty if you buy to a plan.
- 4Use Stock on any catalog row to receive, count, or write off, with a reason – every change lands in the ledger.
Purchase orders and the valuation / dead-stock report are on the buttons at the top of the catalog. Both work from these levels.
Bundles & variants
A bundle is one item that rings several components at once and decrements each component's stock – a gift basket, a starter kit. A variable item carries option groups such as Size or Colour and generates one real child item per combination, each with its own price adjustment, SKU, and stock.
Both live on the Bundle & Variants tab, and both are set by choosing the item type on General first.