Onboarding and product imports
What the guided setup actually tracks, how the first import works, when a daily sync gets scheduled, and how to pick setup back up if you leave halfway through.
Pricemaster tracks your setup and shows you what is left
Setting up a new site is not one action, it is a sequence — and Pricemaster keeps score. While anything is outstanding, a slim progress bar sits across the top of every page showing where you are, what is next, and a “Go live” destination at the end. Each milestone links straight to the screen that completes it.
| Milestone | What completes it | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Import products | Your first catalogue import finishing successfully | Guided setup, then Site Settings |
| Find competitors | Approving the competitor list — or the retailer list, on a brand account | Guided setup, then Competitors or Retailers |
| Minimum margins | Adding your first price band | Minimum Margins |
| Pricing rules | Saving your first rule | Rules |
| Test a rule | Running your first simulation | Rules |
The first two are guided, the rest are yours to do
Products and competitors are done as a guided flow — until they are finished, Pricemaster keeps bringing you back to them, because nothing else in the app works without them. Once both are complete you land on your dashboard with the run of the app, and the remaining three milestones stay on the progress bar as reminders rather than roadblocks.
You can see the full list at any time, with a link into each outstanding step, from the onboarding overview page — reachable from the setup bar and from the dashboard.
Your first product import
Once your platform is connected, the products step kicks off the first catalogue import. It runs in the background as a server-side job, not in your browser, so you can close the tab and come back — the progress bar picks up where it left off.
Start the import
Pricemaster checks whether products already exist for this site. If some do, you get the option to continue with what you have or re-import to refresh from your store.
Watch it work — or do not
A progress bar shows how far through the catalogue it is. On a large catalogue this can take a while, particularly where variations are imported as individual products.
If it stalls or you started it against the wrong store, you can cancel and restart cleanly.
Finish the step
Confirming completion does two things: it ticks the milestone, and it schedules a daily import at roughly the time you finished. That timing is worth revisiting — see below.
What gets imported, and what to check
The exact fields depend on your platform — each connector guide lists them — but broadly Pricemaster pulls identity, price, cost, stock and imagery.
- SKU — the identity of the product. It needs to be unique and stable, because everything else keys off it.
- Barcode, EAN or GTIN — the single most valuable field for competitor matching. If your platform holds it, make sure it is populated.
- Selling price — on the tax basis your platform uses. Pricemaster converts and holds prices consistently internally.
- Cost price — the one people most often discover is missing. Without cost there is no margin, and without margin there is no margin protection.
- Stock level — used to keep out-of-stock products out of pricing decisions.
- Supplier or brand, and categories — what you will use to target rules at a subset of the catalogue.
Ongoing imports and manual syncs
After setup, imports are managed from Site Settings, where you can start one on demand and see the progress, last run time and current status of the running job.
Sync Products
Refreshes your catalogue from the connected platform. Run it manually after a bulk change on your side rather than waiting for the overnight job.
Sync Orders
Pulls recent sales history, on platforms that support it. This is what dashboards, velocity classification and sales-led pricing depend on.
Import schedule
Disable it, or run daily or weekly at a chosen time. Set it earlier than your rule schedule so rules always see fresh data.
Leaving setup halfway through
Setup does not have to be done in one sitting, and nothing is lost if you stop.
- Log back in and Pricemaster returns you to the first outstanding step automatically, as long as products or competitors are still incomplete.
- Once those two are done, use Resume setup on the progress bar to jump to whatever is next.
- Progress is stored against the site, not your browser, so a colleague picking it up on another machine sees exactly the same state.
- The bar disappears on its own once every milestone is complete.
How to tell the site is genuinely ready
The progress bar tells you the steps are done. These tell you the data is good enough to make decisions on — which is a different question, and the more important one.
- The product count matches what you expect from your store, not roughly half of it.
- Cost prices are populated across the catalogue, not just on your newest products.
- A meaningful share of products has at least one competitor price attached — and the ones you sampled are genuinely the same product.
- The dashboard shows recent market movement rather than an empty chart.
- A simulation returns a sensible spread of increases and decreases, rather than everything sitting in “no market price”.