How resellers access and order from a vendor's catalog on InventaCloud

1. Introduction

Throughout this guide we follow a fictional reseller, Harbor Lane Design Supply, getting access to the Residential Lighting catalog of a fictional vendor, Silvercrest Lighting. Every company, catalog, SKU, price, quantity, date, message, and status event shown is fictional demo data.

The platform pieces behind this journey: the Reseller Portal, Catalog Sharing, and the InventaCloud Marketplace. Are you a manufacturer setting up reseller access? Read the vendor-side catalog-sharing guide — this one stays on the reseller's side of the glass.

2. What reseller catalog access means

Catalog access means a vendor has shared a specific catalog with your account: their current product data, at the pricing they've set for you, in a browser portal — no software to install. You always see the vendor's live published version, not an aging email attachment.

Access is scoped, not global: you see the catalogs assigned to you, the products those catalogs permit, and the pricing delivered for your account — nothing more. That scoping is the whole point; it's what lets a vendor share confidently.

3. The two common access paths

Access starts one of two ways — the vendor reaches out to you, or you find the vendor:

Both paths end in the same place: signed in to the reseller portal, looking at the catalogs assigned to you. Neither path exposes every catalog a vendor has — visibility is always per catalog.

4. Receiving a vendor invitation

When a vendor adds you as a reseller, you receive an invitation email — for Harbor Lane it reads like “You've been invited to Silvercrest Lighting's reseller portal” (fictional example) — with a link to the reseller sign-in page. There's no password to create and nothing to install: follow the link, sign in with your email (section 8), and the portal shows whatever Silvercrest has assigned to you. If you sign in before a catalog has been assigned, the portal is simply empty until the vendor assigns one — assignment is the vendor's step, and you're emailed when it happens.

5. Requesting access through the marketplace

If no one invited you, the marketplace is the front door. With a marketplace reseller account (plans are on the marketplace page), you can browse participating vendors and their listed catalogs — listings can include sample product imagery — and request access to the catalog you want, adding a short note about your business. Requests are per catalog: Harbor Lane requests Residential Lighting specifically, and could send separate requests for other Silvercrest catalogs.

Your marketplace account keeps a request inbox where every request shows its status — pending, approved, or denied — with the conversation thread attached to each one (section 18). Marketplace-based catalog access rides on your own marketplace plan staying active; invitation-based access from a vendor doesn't involve a marketplace plan at all.

6. What vendor approval does and does not provide

Approval is a per-catalog decision, not a master key. When Silvercrest approves Harbor Lane's request for Residential Lighting:

• It does establish the reseller relationship (if this is your first approval from that vendor), grant access to the requested catalog, and send you an approval email — with the vendor's response note when they add one.
• It does not expose any other Silvercrest catalog, change what products or pricing the catalog's rules permit for you, or approve any other pending request automatically.

A denial is also per request, comes with an email (and the vendor's note when provided), and isn't necessarily forever — vendors can approve a previously denied request later. And an approval can be withdrawn: if the vendor revokes it, that specific catalog disappears from your portal while any other access you hold remains.

7. Why catalog assignment is still required

Whichever path you arrive by, one rule governs what you can see: a catalog is visible only when it's assigned to you. A relationship alone shows nothing.

On the invitation path the vendor assigns catalogs from their side (you're emailed when they do). On the marketplace path, approving your request is what grants the requested catalog. Either way, what's inside the catalog — which products, at which prices — is governed by the vendor's Catalog Rules, which apply on top of assignment (section 11).

8. Signing in to the reseller portal

The reseller portal uses one-time email codes — there is no password. On the sign-in page you enter your email address and choose Send login code; a 6-digit code arrives by email, and it expires after a few minutes. Type (or paste) the code and you're in. Next visit: same two steps.

Use the email address the vendor invited (or you requested with) — the code only works for an address that's actually connected to a reseller relationship. Codes are one-time and short-lived by design: there's no stored password to forget or leak. If your code expires before you use it, request a new one from the same screen.

9. Finding your approved vendors and catalogs

Signed in, the portal opens on Your catalogs — every catalog assigned to you, across every vendor that's shared with you:

Illustrative portal preview — all data fictional. Each row shows when the catalog was assigned and when the vendor last updated it, with View and Download actions. Resellers working with several suppliers get a company switcher — view everything together or filter to one supplier. The portal is read-only: product data changes come from the vendor, and questions go through Messages (section 17).

10. Browsing permitted products

View opens the catalog's live data — a searchable, pageable table of the columns the vendor publishes for you:

Fictional example. Search finds products by their data; a column picker lets you show, hide, and reorder columns to match how you work — your selection is remembered per catalog. What you're browsing is the permitted view: in our example, Silvercrest's contract-only commercial line is excluded from Harbor Lane's catalog by the vendor's rules, so those products simply don't appear — no gap, no placeholder.

11. Understanding reseller-specific products and pricing

Two resellers of the same vendor can see different things — different product selections, different prices — because vendors share different catalogs with different partners. Each shared catalog carries its own Catalog Rules — which products it includes, and the pricing calculations it delivers — and vendors maintain separately configured catalogs where different tiers or arrangements need different output. The practical takeaway: what you see is your view — the catalogs assigned to you, with the products and pricing those catalogs deliver. Don't assume another dealer's screenshot matches yours, and don't assume you have the full manufacturer range unless your vendor says so. If a product you expect is missing, that's a catalog-configuration or assignment question for the vendor — section 21 covers how to ask it well.

12. Reviewing MAP, price, and availability information

Pricing arrives as data fields the vendor publishes — typically your reseller price, plus reference prices like MSRP and, where the vendor supplies it, MAP:

Read these for what they are: your price is the price delivered for your account through this catalog — it isn't a binding quote, and it doesn't replace the commercial terms you hold with the vendor. MAP is the vendor's advertising floor, shown so you can honor it — InventaCloud displays it; it doesn't police your storefront. Availability is what the vendor has reported — it isn't a reservation and doesn't guarantee stock when you order.

13. Viewing product images and supporting catalog information

Product information beyond pricing — descriptions, dimensions, finish, categories, and the image references the vendor maintains — travels as catalog fields in the same permitted view and in your downloads. Vendors manage the imagery itself on their side (see Product Images); on the marketplace, listed catalogs can show sample product imagery right on the listing page, which is often your first look at a line before requesting access. Inside the portal, the catalog view is deliberately a data table — built for checking fields, prices, and coverage fast — with the full row set one download away. If imagery you need isn't in the shared data, ask the vendor through Messages; how image files are delivered to partners is the vendor's call.

14. Downloading permitted catalog data

Everything you can browse, you can take with you. The Download menu on each catalog exports your permitted view — same products, same columns, same reseller pricing:

Distinguish the four ways data reaches you: browsing in the portal (always current), downloading a file (a snapshot of the current data), connecting your own systems via the portal's API keys where the vendor's plan supports feeds, and ordering (section 19 — a different action entirely). A download is a file of product data, full stop: it doesn't publish products to an ecommerce store, doesn't sync your website, doesn't reserve anything, and won't update itself — for fresher data, download again or read it live over the API.

15. Reviewing price, inventory, and discontinued-item updates

Vendors update their catalogs over time — prices move, stock changes, products get discontinued. Your portal always reflects the vendor's current published data, and three surfaces help you stay current:

The Inventory page is worth a bookmark: it shows reported stock levels for the products you can access, flags low and out-of-stock items, and shows expected restock dates and quantities where the vendor provides them — exportable as CSV, Excel, or JSON. Discontinued status travels as product data too, so a discontinued SKU shows up as such rather than silently vanishing. Make checking before big orders a habit — the portal shows you the current state whenever you look, and your quoting stays honest.

16. Understanding notifications and unread indicators

Notifications center on the conversations and orders, not on data churn. Inside the portal, unread badges on Messages and Purchase orders show where something new is waiting, and they clear as you read. By email, you hear about the events that need you: your invitation, a catalog being assigned to you, your marketplace request being approved or denied, new messages from a vendor, and activity on your orders. Email is the nudge; the portal record is the truth — when an email and a screen seem to disagree, trust the screen and refresh. There's no notification-preferences panel to configure here, and no daily digest: the portal shows current state whenever you sign in, and the emails cover the events between visits.

17. Contacting the vendor

Questions live next to the thing they're about — three separate conversation contexts, each with its own home:

Direct messages reach the vendor's inbox and trigger an email notification on their side; replies land back in your thread, and unread counts keep score for both parties. These are scoped, work-attached conversations — not a general team-chat tool, and there are no product-level comment boxes; a question about one SKU goes in the supplier's message thread with the SKU named.

18. Using marketplace request threads

Every marketplace access request carries its own thread, and it's the right channel before access exists — introduce your business when you request, answer the vendor's questions while they review, and follow up if a request is denied (“what would you need to see from us?”). Your marketplace inbox lists all your conversations — request threads and direct threads together — with unread counts, so a vendor's question never dies unnoticed in a tab you stopped checking. Once you're approved and working day to day in the reseller portal, the per-supplier message thread (section 17) becomes the natural home for ongoing questions; the request thread remains the record of how access came to be.

19. Creating a purchase-order draft

Where a vendor supports purchase orders, a Purchase orders section appears in your portal, and ordering starts from the catalog you already trust — permitted products, your prices:

Fictional example. Add products, set quantities, and review lines at your displayed reseller pricing; drafts autosave once you start editing, so a draft you leave on Tuesday is waiting on Thursday. You can keep a book of your own customers in the portal and attach ship-to details from it. If the Purchase orders section doesn't appear for one of your suppliers, that vendor hasn't enabled PO collection — orders for them happen outside the platform.

20. Submitting and following a purchase order

Submitting sends the order to the vendor's PO inbox and locks in what you asked for — later catalog price changes never rewrite a submitted order's lines. From there, the order moves through the platform's statuses:

Each order keeps its own thread — in our fictional example, Silvercrest asks whether Harbor Lane wants 6 or 8 pendants, and the answer lives on the order, with unread badges and email notifications carrying the back-and-forth. Two things to hold precisely: Fulfilled is a platform status — the vendor marking the order complete on their side; it isn't structured shipment tracking, doesn't prove delivery, and doesn't reserve inventory. A tracking number, if the vendor shares one, arrives as plain text in the order thread. And changed your mind after submitting? You request cancellation — the status only changes when the vendor cancels it from their side. The full lifecycle, from draft autosave to snapshots and cancellation requests, is its own guide: once access is established, follow the complete B2B purchase-order workflow.

21. Troubleshooting missing access or missing products

Almost every “I can't see it” has one of a few causes — check them in order:

When in doubt, message the vendor with specifics — catalog name, SKU, what you expected to see. Scoped access means “missing” is usually a decision or a pending step, not a defect.

22. Common reseller catalog-access mistakes

23. Reseller-access checklist

Common questions