First Hour with Supply Master: A Walk-Through Setup for a New S&S Store

You've installed Supply Master on your Shopify store. The trial is running. You have an S&S Activewear web-services account in hand. You have an hour before your next print job hits the press.

This article gets your S&S catalog into Shopify, with the right filters, the right pricing rules, and the right inventory mapping, in that hour.

It is written for the non-technical apparel-store owner. Every screen name in this guide matches what you'll see in the app. Every step says what it does for your store before it tells you which button to click. By the end, you'll have a few thousand S&S products live on your Shopify store, with stock and prices refreshing on schedule and orders ready to route back to S&S.

Running example used throughout this article: Northside Print Co., a six-person screen-print and embroidery shop. They're connecting S&S as their first supplier on Supply Master. They want to import only the brands they actually decorate (Gildan, Bella+Canvas, Comfort Colors, Next Level, Champion). They want a 50% markup on blanks rounded to the nearest 95 cents. They ship from Texas, so they want their nearest S&S warehouses to drive availability.

Key Takeaways

  • What this article shows — how to set up Supply Master on a new Shopify store with S&S Activewear as the first supplier, end-to-end, in one hour.
  • Who it's for — non-technical apparel-store owners or ops leads installing the trial for the first time.
  • The fast answer — six steps: install + add supplier + connect credentials + filter the catalog + set pricing + run first sync. About 45 minutes once your S&S API account is in hand.
  • What it doesn't do (yet) — automated decorator order consolidation across multiple Shopify orders is on the roadmap; today, dropship orders go through one at a time on the Order Sync mode you pick.
  • Try it now — Install Supply Master free on the Shopify App Store (5.0★, top-rated for apparel-supplier integration in the U.S. and Canada).
  • Want help? — Email support@comstack.com and a Comstack engineer will walk through the install with you.

Table of contents

What you need before you start

Three things, all of which you can have in hand within a few business days:

  • An S&S Activewear web-services account. This is the API tier of an S&S customer account — different from the regular dealer login. To request one, log into your S&S dealer account and look for "API access" under your account settings, or call your S&S rep. You'll receive an API username, password, and customer number.
  • Your Shopify admin account with permission to install apps and edit products.
  • A list of the brands you actually decorate or resell. Even if you're a high-volume store, you almost never want all 90,000+ S&S SKUs. Most decorators run between 5 and 30 brands.

If you want help with any of the above, email support@comstack.com — Comstack engineers can request the S&S account and walk through the install with you.

Step 1 — Install Supply Master and add S&S as a supplier

What this does for your store. Adds the Supply Master app to your Shopify admin, creates a new "supplier connection" inside the app, and gets you to the screen where you'll plug in S&S's data.

Steps:

  1. Install the app. Go to the Supply Master App Store listing and click "Add app." Approve the standard Shopify permission scopes. The app opens in your Shopify admin.
  2. Open the supplier list. From the Supply Master home screen, click "Suppliers." You'll see an empty list and an "Add supplier" button.
  3. Click "Add supplier." A modal opens with the list of supported suppliers — S&S Activewear, SanMar US, SanMar Canada, AlphaBroder, Cap America, OTTO Cap, Goldstar, Atlantic Coast Cotton, Edwards, Scrub Authority, Augusta, AS Colour, CHAMPRO, Decky, JDS Industries, plus a "Custom Supplier" option.
  4. Select "S&S Activewear." The app creates a new supplier configuration and opens it on the Edit Supplier screen.

Time to complete: under five minutes.

If your store has a custom name for S&S in your records, name the supplier connection accordingly (S&S Activewear is the default). The name shows up in Sync History and on supplier reports later.

Step 2 — Connect your S&S credentials

What this does for your store. Gives Supply Master permission to read your S&S catalog, stock, and prices, and (when you turn it on) place orders back at S&S.

Steps:

  1. In Edit Supplier, click the "Credentials" tab. Three fields appear: API Username, API Password, Customer Number.
  2. Enter the values from your S&S web-services account. Username and password are the API ones (different from your S&S dealer login). Customer number is on your S&S dealer paperwork.
  3. Click "Validate." The app makes a test call against the S&S REST API. A green check means the credentials work. A red error means the credentials don't, and the error message will tell you why (usually "username or password is wrong" or "API access not yet approved").

If validation fails, the most common cause is a regular dealer-account login being entered instead of the web-services API credentials. Re-confirm with your S&S rep that the web-services account has been activated.

For full credential walkthroughs across all suppliers, see how to get your supplier credentials.

Time to complete: under five minutes once you have the credentials in hand.

Step 3 — Filter the catalog

What this does for your store. Decides which slice of S&S's 90,000+ SKUs to import into Shopify. You almost certainly do not want all of them. Filtering keeps your Shopify catalog clean and your monthly sync volume manageable.

Steps:

  1. In Edit Supplier, click the "Catalog Filters" tab. Several filter types appear: brand, category, color, size, price range, and custom (SKU list).
  2. Pick your brands. Click "Brands" and check the brands you actually decorate. For Northside Print Co., that's Gildan, Bella+Canvas, Comfort Colors, Next Level, and Champion. Leave the other 100+ S&S brands unchecked.
  3. Pick your sizes. Click "Sizes." Most decorators want XS through 4XL. Some skip XS or 5XL+ depending on what they actually print.
  4. Pick your colors. This is optional. Most stores leave colors fully open. If you specifically don't decorate certain colors (e.g. you skip white because of mockup issues), uncheck them.
  5. Set a price range. Optional. Most stores leave open. If you're a budget-tier seller, you might cap wholesale at $30; if you're a premium-tier seller, you might require wholesale ≥ $20.
  6. Click "Save filters."

Time to complete: five to ten minutes the first time.

The result for Northside Print Co. is roughly 4,000 S&S SKUs (down from 90,000+), all in the brands they actually decorate, in the sizes they actually print, at reasonable price points. That's a much friendlier Shopify catalog than 90,000 of which they'd never use 86,000.

For the available filter types per supplier, see available supplier data fields.

Step 4 — Set your pricing rule

What this does for your store. Writes a one-line rule that calculates retail price from S&S wholesale on every sync. When S&S raises wholesale, your Shopify retail goes up automatically with margin intact. You write the rule once.

Steps:

  1. In Edit Supplier, click the "Product Settings" tab, then the "Match Fields" section.
  2. Find the row for Price. This row tells the app what value to write to Shopify's price field on each variant.
  3. Click "Edit formula" on that row. A small editor opens with the supplier's available data fields visible on the left (wholesale, msrp, case_price, etc.) and a Liquid formula box on the right.
  4. Type your formula. For Northside Print Co.'s 50%-markup-rounded-to-.95 rule:
{{ wholesale | times: 1.5 | round_to_95 }}

This means: take the supplier's wholesale, multiply by 1.5, round to the nearest .95.

  1. Click "Test" with a sample SKU (the editor lets you pick one). The app shows you what the rule would produce for that SKU's wholesale. Verify the math.
  2. Click "Save formula."

Time to complete: five minutes once you know your markup.

For the recipe collection of common pricing formulas (different markups per brand, MAP-aware, case-pack-aware, tiered, rounded), see Supply Master Pricing Formulas: 12 Liquid Recipes for Wholesale Apparel.

For the Liquid formula reference, see customizing fields with Liquid formulas.

Step 5 — Configure inventory and warehouses

What this does for your store. Tells the app what stock count to write into Shopify, how to handle S&S's eight warehouses, and how often to refresh.

Steps:

  1. In Edit Supplier, click the "Inventory Settings" tab.
  2. Choose your warehouse handling. Three options: combine (default — sums all S&S warehouses), filter (sums only selected warehouses), or map (writes each warehouse to a separate Shopify location).
    • For Northside Print Co. shipping from Texas, the right choice is filter. Select Mexia (Texas), McDonough (Georgia), Olathe (Kansas), and Lockport (Illinois) — the four S&S warehouses with fastest reach to their customer base. Leave the western warehouses (Reno, Las Vegas) unchecked because they ship slow to Texas customers.
    • For a pure dropshipper with national customers, combine is the right choice.
    • For a multi-location Shopify store with own holding stock, map is the right choice.
  3. Set the buffer. Optional but recommended. A 5-unit safety buffer per variant absorbs the small lag between S&S's reality and the last sync. Type 5 in the buffer field.
  4. Click "Save inventory settings."

For the deeper walk-through of combine vs filter vs map, see Multi-warehouse inventory on Shopify: combine, filter, or map?.

For the help-doc walkthrough, see setting up inventory by warehouse location.

Time to complete: five minutes.

Step 6 — Run the first sync

What this does for your store. Pulls the first batch of S&S products into Shopify and writes the prices, stock counts, images, and spec data.

Steps:

  1. In Edit Supplier, click the "Automatic Sync" tab.
  2. Set the schedule. Default for S&S is stock every few hours, prices daily, full catalog weekly. You can change any of these. For most stores, the defaults are right.
  3. Click "Run first sync now." The app starts pulling the filtered catalog. For Northside Print Co.'s 4,000-SKU subset, the first sync takes 10–30 minutes depending on Shopify's API rate at the time of day.
  4. Watch progress in Sync History. This screen shows live progress, item counts, and any errors per supplier. Most first syncs complete cleanly. If any items fail (usually because of Shopify's product-validation rules on a small number of edge-case items), the failure log is right there.
  5. Open Shopify products. Your filtered catalog is now live on your store. Click into any product to verify the variants, prices, images, and stock counts.

Time to complete: 10–30 minutes for the first sync to run; under five minutes for setup before that.

After the first sync, the schedule takes over. Stock refreshes every few hours; prices refresh daily; the full catalog refreshes weekly. You don't have to do anything else.

Step 7 — Decide how orders go back to S&S

What this does for your store. Tells the app whether (and how) to push Shopify orders for S&S products back to S&S as drop-ship POs.

Steps:

  1. In Edit Supplier, click the "Order Settings" tab.
  2. Pick the routing mode. Four options:
    • Auto. Shopify confirms the order; the app places the corresponding S&S order within minutes. Right for pure dropshippers.
    • Scheduled. Orders accumulate in App Orders; the app sends them in a daily (or your-cadence) batch to S&S. Right for stores that want to consolidate freight.
    • Manual. Orders accumulate in App Orders; you click "Send" when you've reviewed each one. Right for decorators who decorate the blanks before fulfillment, or for any store that wants a human in the loop.
    • Off. The app pulls catalog and stock but does not push orders. You handle ordering yourself. Right for stores that decorate everything in-house and use S&S only as a catalog source.
  3. For Northside Print Co. (decorator): select Manual. Their workflow is "customer orders the decorated tee on Shopify; we print the tee in-house from blanks we already hold; we re-order the blanks from S&S in batches every few days." Manual order routing fits.
  4. Click "Save order settings."

You can change order mode any time. Many decorators start on Manual, get comfortable, and move to Scheduled once their volume justifies a daily batch.

How real stores configure this

The walk-through above is one configuration. Other store shapes change the configuration meaningfully:

Store shape Filters Pricing Inventory Order mode
Northside Print Co. (multi-supplier decorator, TX) 5 brands, XS–4XL wholesale × 1.5, round to .95 Filter to TX/GA/KS/IL warehouses, 5-unit buffer Manual
Pure S&S dropshipper (national) 10 brands, XS–3XL wholesale × 1.4, round to .99 Combine all 8 warehouses, 5-unit buffer Auto
Healthcare uniform retailer (PA) 3 medical-uniform brands wholesale × 1.6, MAP floor, round to .95 Filter to East Coast warehouses, 10-unit buffer Manual
Youth-baseball team store (regional) 2 athletic brands, youth sizes wholesale × 1.45, round to .95 Combine, 0 buffer (single seasonal order) Off (Augusta-style; place one PO at season close)
Corporate merch shop (multi-supplier) 4 polo brands, S–2XL wholesale × 1.55, round to .95 Combine, 5-unit buffer Scheduled

The pattern is the same across all of them. Six steps; one hour; and the configuration is something you set once and review quarterly.

What it doesn't do (yet)

Three things to know about Supply Master + S&S today:

  • Decorator order consolidation. If ten Shopify orders for the same Gildan 5000 should be batched into one PO at S&S, the current setup is "scheduled order routing daily" — which keeps your daily PO at one rather than ten. True in-app multi-Shopify-order-into-one-PO consolidation is on the roadmap.
  • Per-zip dynamic warehouse routing. The Filter option uses static warehouse selection (you pick the warehouse subset once). Per-customer-zip dynamic routing is handled with Map plus Shopify's location-aware fulfillment, or with a custom fulfillment-routing app on top. This is rare, but worth knowing.
  • Shopify variant ceiling on the legacy plan. If your Shopify plan still has the old 100-variant cap (most don't anymore), use the variant splitting (legacy feature) to split S&S styles into smaller products. Modern Shopify supports up to 2,048 variants per product and doesn't need this.

These are listed honestly so you know what you're trialing. Most S&S stores don't hit any of them.

FAQ

How long does it really take?

About 45 minutes once your S&S API account is in hand. The bottleneck is usually the API account — S&S takes a few business days to approve. Once you have the credentials, the install + setup is one short session.

Will Supply Master delete my existing Shopify products?

No. Supply Master adds new products from S&S to your Shopify catalog, attached to a "Supply Master" tag so you can identify them. Your existing non-S&S products are unaffected. If you have existing S&S products in Shopify that match the SKUs the app imports, the app will update those (with your permission) rather than create duplicates.

What if I want to add SanMar later?

Repeat the process for SanMar: Suppliers > Add supplier > SanMar US, plug in your SanMar EDI credentials, configure filters, pricing, inventory, and orders for SanMar specifically. Each supplier has its own configuration; you can run S&S as Filter and SanMar as Combine in the same install.

What if my pricing rule is more complex?

Most decorator pricing rules are one to three Liquid lines. Common patterns are documented in Supply Master Pricing Formulas: 12 Liquid Recipes for Wholesale Apparel. If your rule is different — different markup per brand, MAP-floor enforcement, case-pack-aware pricing, tiered pricing — there's a recipe for it. If not, email support@comstack.com and we'll write the formula with you.

What does the first sync actually pull?

For S&S: product titles, vendor (brand) names, product types (categories), variants (color, size, SKU, barcode), variant images (per color, per size where available), stock counts (per warehouse, summed/filtered/mapped per your inventory setting), wholesale and computed retail prices, spec data (fabric, weight, care, country of origin where S&S exposes it). For the full data field list, see available supplier data fields.

Can I run AI+ on this catalog?

Yes. AI+ is the optional add-on that rewrites supplier descriptions into clean SEO copy — title variants, meta descriptions, bulleted product descriptions. Configure AI+ from the supplier's Product Settings > AI+ tab after the first sync. See AI+ enriched product data.

What if I change my mind in week two?

Most settings are editable. Change a filter, the next sync re-evaluates which products belong in your catalog (and removes products that no longer match — with confirmation). Change the pricing rule, the next sync re-prices. Change the inventory setting, the next sync re-writes stock counts using the new rule. The schedule respects your changes from the next run.

What if I want to uninstall?

Uninstalling Supply Master leaves your Shopify catalog as-is. The products that Supply Master imported stay in Shopify; they just stop refreshing. You can keep selling them, edit them manually, or delete them — your call. Your supplier credentials and configuration are removed when you uninstall, so reinstalling means re-doing setup.

Can the Comstack team set this up for me?

Yes. Email support@comstack.com and a Comstack engineer will run the install for you, including credential help, filtered import, pricing rules, inventory mapping, and order setup. Most setup calls take 30 to 45 minutes.

What does it cost?

Free trial. Plans scale with variant count, sync volume, and supplier count. Exact pricing on the App Store listing.

Try it on your store

The first hour is the install. Every hour after that is the catalog running on its own.

  1. Install Supply Master free on the Shopify App Store — 5.0★, top-rated for apparel-supplier integration in the U.S. and Canada.
  2. Or email support@comstack.com — a Comstack engineer will run the install with you, end-to-end, in one call.

Comstack has been building integrations for apparel and promo suppliers since 2012. If you can read this article, you can run the install. If you'd rather hand it off, we'll do it for you.

Print the next job. The catalog will be ready when you come back.

Tony Matthews
Apparel Supplier Solutions Specialist
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