Getting Started as an Online Ordering Vendor

Silo’s online ordering seeks to improve the order management process between vendors and their customers. The Silo portal provides a one-stop-shop for trading partners to share their catalogs digitally, create order requests, send invoices, and communicate instantly via chat.

In order to add a vendor to the trading platform, you’ll need to navigate to Contacts > Customers in Silo, create the customer if you haven’t already, and add at least one contact with an email address specified. Once you’ve done that, you can press ‘Invite to online ordering’ to invite them to create a Silo account.
There may be a delay of 1 business day between when your invite is generated and when your trading partner receives the invite. If your trading partner does not receive the invitation, please check to ensure that you have the correct email address in Silo for them. If issues persist, please contact your Silo CSM.

If you want customers to be able to order directly from your inventory (instead of entering items as free-text), navigate to Settings > Online Ordering and ensure that the ‘Share inventory catalog’ setting is enabled.
You can also choose to share prices in online ordering on a per-customer basis. If you navigate to Contacts > Customers, select the customer of interest, and press ‘Edit customer’, you’ll see a ‘Share prices in online ordering catalog’ checkbox. When this checkbox is selected, the customer will see all published prices (based on their assigned price sheet) for items in your catalog, and these prices will default in and be read-only when the customer adds a catalog item to their order request.
If you want to encourage your customer to use online ordering, or provide them with a quick direct link to your catalog, you can copy a link using the 'Copy catalog link' button on the Online Orders > Incoming Requests screen and share it with any customer via text or WhatsApp.

When a customer creates a new order request, you will receive an email notification. You may click the link in the email to access the request or access it directly via the Online Orders > Incoming Requests screen in Silo—any new request or request with changes you haven’t view will display with a ‘NEW’ indicator in the list view.
Upon receiving an order request, you may edit, confirm, or cancel. Whatever action you take, your customer will receive an email notification.
If your customer designates you as a trusted vendor, you’ll be able to confirm order requests on their behalf after making adjustments. Otherwise, if you’re making changes to the request (such as substituting an item that’s not in stock), you’ll need to save your changes and send them back to your customer to confirm.
If there is a missing required field (marked by a red asterisk), you will not be able to confirm the request. If you do not see the missing field, please ensure all sections are expanded.
Both the vendor and customer can take action to update the status of an order request. Once the request is confirmed, it means that both parties have agreed to the request and changes to items can no longer be made.

If you're using Silo's IMS product, you'll be able to easily create a sales order pre-populated with the information from the order request. You'll see a ‘Create sales order’ button appear in the footer of the request once it's confirmed.
Creating a sales order for each order request is critical to ensure that data flows into Silo's Inventory and Accounts Receivable functionality.

For more information about how to use online ordering as a customer, see the following article: