Catalog and Customer Portal
Everything else in GarmentFlow faces inward — the people who design, cut, sew and ship. This section faces the other way: what your customers see.
There are two distinct surfaces, and it's worth being clear which is which before you set either up.
The catalog is public. The portal is private.
The catalog is a storefront. Anyone with the link can browse it, open a product, build a size grid and request a quote — no account needed. It is a lead-generation front door: nothing here charges a card or commits stock. A submitted cart becomes a Quotation in ERPNext for your sales team to price and follow up.
The customer portal is for people who are already your customers. It runs on the Customer role, and every page is scoped to the Customer the signed-in person resolves to, so it shows their work and nothing else: the collections you made for them, the tech packs, the samples in progress, the production status of their orders, and the sustainability story behind it all.
One is how you win the order. The other is how you keep the customer informed once you have it.
The pages
- Catalog Settings — routing, branding, wholesale vs retail, trust badges, and the custom-quote channel. Set up once.
- Publishing a product — the Published Tech Pack: what turns a finished Tech Pack into something a buyer can see, price and order.
- The storefront — what a buyer actually does: browse, filter, configure, add to cart, request a quote.
- Customer portal — Lookbook, Fichas Técnicas, Samples, Production Status and Sustainability, for a logged-in customer.
How it connects to the rest of GarmentFlow
The catalog does not hold its own product data. It is a publishing layer over Tech Packs:
A Tech Pack is the internal spec. A Published Tech Pack is the customer-facing face of it — marketing copy, hero image, gallery, price tiers, branding options. One Tech Pack, one published product.
That means what a buyer sees is never a separate catalogue someone has to keep in step. Change the variants on the Tech Pack and the swatches on the product page change with them.
And it means the whole chain is already joined up: a quote becomes a Sales Order, a Sales Order becomes a Production Order, and the customer watches it move on the portal's Production Status page.
Publishing puts prices on the public internet. Sanity-check the price tiers and the branding costs on a Published Tech Pack before you tick Published — that tick is the whole of the access control.
What to do next
Start with Catalog Settings — the route prefix in particular, because changing it later means changing a Web Page route to match.