Catalog: products your customers can actually order, not just browse

A product list that lives in a spreadsheet isn't a catalog — it's a chore. The catalog module is your products as data the rest of the workspace can actually use.

Your products, properly stored

Products are workspace master data: name, description, pricing, categories. If you're migrating from somewhere, the CSV import gets you in the door in one pass — upload, map, done. Every product carries an identifier your other modules know how to reference, which is the quiet feature that makes everything else in this post possible.

The public side, without the login dance

Your catalog can be read publicly through an API scoped by your workspace's slug — no customer data in it, just product information, so another site or a partner can pull your listings without credentials. That same openness runs the customer-facing flow: a contact can build a cart, and the cart converts into a real order in your workspace — not a form submission someone retypes later.

Checkout is Stripe, on your own account — bring your own key. The money moves from your customer to your Stripe; the order and its payment state land in your workspace. We never sit between you and your processor.

The stock awareness

Here's where the catalog meets the warehouse. When the stock manager is enabled, ordering checks availability before the order is accepted — try to order ten of a thing with three on the shelf and you'll get a refusal that says exactly that: insufficient stock, ten needed, three available. The public API carries a coarse availability signal too — in stock or out of stock — so your customers see honest counts without seeing your warehouse math.

And when an order is paid, fulfillment flows through stock: the sale posts against inventory, cost of goods lands in the ledger, and the shipping module picks the order up from there. The catalog isn't an island; it's the storefront end of a pipeline.

Where I fit

I'm the fast path into your own catalog — looking up a product's details while you're on a call, checking what a customer ordered last time, or helping draft product descriptions when you're seeding a new line. The products are yours; I just save you the scrolling.

The order is a full citizen when it lands: it belongs to a contact, so "what did this customer order" is history instead of archaeology, and it carries the payment state the checkout produced. If you publish the catalog API to a partner, the coarse availability signal — in stock or out — travels with the listing, while quantities, margins and warehouse math stay private.

Categories keep the catalog navigable as it grows, and the listing views carry the admin basics — price, availability, what's linked where — so maintenance is a table edit, not a form hunt. The public API stays read-only by design: customers and partners can look; only your workspace can change.

Related: orders check stock before they're accepted, and fulfillment ends with a shipping record — the storefront end of one pipeline.

How this compares

If you need a full storefront, Shopify is the industry default and it does that job superbly. But plenty of small businesses don't need a storefront — they need a product list their customers can order from, without adopting an e-commerce platform, a theme marketplace, and a monthly plan to go with them. The other common substitute is the spreadsheet-plus-email order system, which works until two people sell the last item at once.

This module is the middle path. Products import from CSV (or a connector sync), a public catalog API exposes the list without exposing customer data, and a cart turns selections into a real order in the workspace — with Stripe checkout running on your own Stripe account, so fees and payouts go straight to you. Stock awareness is built in: when the linked inventory says an item is gone, the cart says so instead of taking the money and apologizing later. And because fulfillment draws from the stock ledger, an order isn't a row in a webshop — it's the first step of a real operational record. Simpler than a storefront; more honest than a spreadsheet.

Try it

The catalog lives under Catalog in your sidebar. Import a CSV of your products, open the public API with your workspace slug to see how clean the data is, and place a test order through the cart. If you run stock, watch the availability check refuse an order you can't fulfill — that refusal is worth more than any feature on this page.