Run a small product store as a library and a weekly drop
Small product sellers don't want a 1,500-SKU shop. They keep about 50 good products, show 20 to 25 at a time and change them every week. The catalogue module is built around that: a library, a live set, a weekly drop that is approved before it goes live, and nothing on the site that isn't backed by stored data.
How it works
- Bring the products in. Import a Shopify export or a CSV. Rows that fail create nothing, and old Shopify URLs redirect.
- Price against margin. Each product stores its cost. Margin after cost and shipping shows beside the price, and anything under the owner's target (44% in the example) is flagged.
- Keep a library and a live set. The library holds 50 products. The live set is capped at 22. Only the live set renders on the site, in feeds and in search.
- Plan next week's drop. Pick what goes in, what comes out and the hero product. An audit checks stock, sizes, images and margin first.
- Publish at a set time as one release. For example, Monday 20:00. One click rolls it back. Products that rotate out keep their URL as "Back soon".
- Supplier changes wait for approval. The weekly price list goes into a staging area that is never public. New items, cost changes, stock-outs and discontinued items are each approved. A cost change comes with a suggested price that keeps the margin.
- Failures are loud and safe. If an import, sync or drop fails, the site stays on the last good release. The owner gets WhatsApp and email naming the step, the item and the reason.
What it is and isn't
Better than the usual store builder
- Cost, margin and a target on every product
- Library, live set and a scheduled weekly drop
- Hero product of the week across home, listing and feeds
- Supplier staging with a diff and approval
- Size charts once, attached to many products
- Shopify import with redirects
- Variant images while you create a product, not after
Not in this module
- Cart, checkout, payments, orders and shipping. Those belong to the Commerce module, phase C
- Until then, every product's button is "Enquire on WhatsApp", prefilled with product, size and colour
- No fake "people ordered this" counters or urgency timers
- Ratings only from real reviews
- No marketplace, multiple vendors or point of sale
Release order
| Phase | What ships | Epics |
|---|---|---|
| A · catalogue mode | Products, variants, media, attributes and size charts, categories, collections, Shopify/CSV import, storefront with WhatsApp enquiry, SEO and schema, weekly drop | E1–E6, E8, E9, E10 SEO, E11 |
| B | Inventory rules, bulk-edit grid, Meta and Google feeds, catalogue API, supplier staging and alerts, reviews | E7, E8 grid, E10, E12 |
| C · commerce | Cart, checkout, payments, orders, notifications | Commerce module |
Phase A alone covers the first prospect if a WhatsApp enquiry is acceptable instead of checkout.
Rules carried over from the website builder
- Every change is a typed command on versioned catalogue data, whether it comes from a person, an import, AI or the API.
- Prices, stock and claims on the site trace to a stored value. If a value is unknown, it is shown as unknown, never zero.
- AI and supplier scraping only propose changes. Code decides, a person approves, and a release publishes.
Still to decide
- Is WhatsApp enquiry enough for launch, or is checkout a hard requirement?
- Product cap per plan
- Supplier sync without an API: CSV upload only, or an operator-run scraper with alerts?
- Copy protection: we can watermark images and block hot-linking. We can't stop someone copying a public store, so we should say so up front.