Brand subscriptions
Brand subscriptions are how the multi-tenant catalog scales. Instead of a retailer hand-picking each of a brand's 500 SKUs individually, they subscribe to the brand once, and every SKU, current and future, flows in automatically.
The problem subscriptions solve
Without subscriptions, a retailer carrying 15 brands would need to:
- Manually activate each of those brands' parts in their tenant
- Monitor the central catalog for new SKUs each brand adds
- Manually activate those new SKUs when they appear
- Miss them otherwise, and frustrate customers searching for parts that "should be available"
Brand subscriptions remove the manual maintenance loop. Subscribe once, and the subscription handles ongoing activation of the brand's catalog into the retailer's tenant.
How a subscription works
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Retailer subscribes to a brand
Via the customer portal or admin tool. Each subscription is one row linking (tenant, brand).
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All current parts in that brand are activated
A bulk-create operation populates TenantCatalogItem rows for every part where Part.brand matches the subscribed brand.
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Future parts auto-activate
When a new part is added to the central catalog with that brand, the platform creates the TenantCatalogItem for every subscribing tenant. No manual re-import needed.
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Retailer adds price and stock
Activated catalog items start with no price and no stock, the retailer fills them in via portal, CSV upload, or their POS/ERP push.
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Parts appear on the retailer's storefront
Through the YMM widget, search, browse, anywhere their Shopify (or other) theme queries the public API.
What a subscription includes
A brand subscription gives the retailer access to the full catalog content for every part in that brand:
- Part numbers, OEM cross-references, EAN
- Descriptions (sanitised HTML), multi-image galleries, dimensions, weight, country of origin
- Hierarchical category placement
- Fitment data, which vehicles each part fits, with position and notes
- Lifecycle status (Draft / Active / Deprecated / Discontinued) plus replaced-by pointers
- Manual PDFs and related media
What the retailer adds on top: price and stock. Plus optional per-tenant flags like "show on storefront" (a separate switch from the central lifecycle status).
Picking parts manually instead of subscribing
A retailer can also activate individual parts without subscribing to the whole brand. Use cases:
- They carry only a subset of a brand's catalog (e.g., only the air-filter category)
- They want to test sales of a single SKU before committing to the brand
- The brand isn't fully in the central catalog yet and they're activating one-off parts
Manual activation creates the same TenantCatalogItem row, just without the subscription record. Future SKUs from that brand won't auto-activate. The retailer would need to activate them individually.
Manufacturer-side: who can be subscribed to?
A "brand" in PowersportOS is a first-class entity with its own metadata: logo, website, country of origin, contact info. A retailer can subscribe to any brand whose parts are in the central catalog. The brand doesn't need to be a tenant on the platform themselves, many brands appear in the central catalog as content, without being a paying customer.
When a brand IS also a Manufacturer tenant, they get additional privileges: managing their own brand metadata, seeing reseller stock visibility for their parts, dropping the "find a reseller" widget on their own brand site. See Tenant types for the full picture.
Unsubscribing
A retailer can unsubscribe from a brand at any time. Unsubscribing:
- Does NOT delete the TenantCatalogItem rows for parts already activated under the subscription. The retailer keeps the catalog items they had, with their pricing and stock intact.
- Stops auto-activation of future parts from that brand. New SKUs the brand adds won't flow into the tenant.
- Can be reactivated by re-subscribing. The new subscription does NOT duplicate already-activated parts, it just resumes auto-activation for future SKUs.
The design assumption is that unsubscribing usually means "this brand isn't strategic for us anymore", not "remove all traces of this brand from our store". The retailer can still bulk-deactivate the previously-activated items in their tenant if they want to fully clear them.