Your product catalogue is the spine of the warehouse. Every receipt, pick, kit and report leans on it, so the few minutes you spend setting a product up well are repaid every time it moves. Loaditude is built for the messy reality of a 3PL catalogue: one item can carry several barcodes, look different from every angle, and sit in many locations at once. This guide covers products, SKUs, barcodes, images and stock so your catalogue works as hard as your team does.
Creating products and SKUs
Each product has a SKU, the unique code you and your client use to refer to it, along with a name and the rest of its detail. The SKU is what ties a physical item to everything Loaditude knows about it: where it is stored, how much you hold, and which orders and kits need it. You can create products up front or add them as you go. A quick-create product step is available during goods-in, so a SKU that turns up unexpectedly on a delivery can be set up and receipted in the same flow rather than blocking the dock (see Goods-in and receiving).
Once a product exists, its detail can be edited at any time, so a catalogue that started thin can be enriched as you learn more about an item without re-creating it.
Multiple barcodes per product
Real stock rarely carries one tidy barcode. The outer case has one code, the inner unit has another, a relabelled batch has a third. Loaditude handles this directly: a single product can hold more than one barcode. Register an outer-case code and an inner-unit code against the same SKU and both are valid for that item.
This matters most at the scanner. During pick and pack quality checks, Loaditude accepts the product’s main barcode, any of the extra barcodes you have added, or the SKU itself as a fallback. So a scan passes whether the picker caught the outer code, the inner code, or keyed the SKU, and a carton that arrived with an unexpected code is a quick edit (add the barcode) rather than a stoppage. The more codes you register, the more forgiving the floor becomes. The same scan-to-verify behaviour powers picking and pick waves.
Product images and galleries
A picture removes doubt. A picker can confirm at a glance that they have the right item, and your client can see what you are holding for them. Loaditude lets every product carry a main image, and you can add several photos in a gallery on the product page for different angles, packaging or labels. Click any image to view it full size. You can upload, replace or remove a product’s image both when creating it and when editing it later.
Those images are not buried on the edit form. Product thumbnails appear in the inventory list (in their own leading column), on the inventory item view, and in the client portal inventory, with a clear placeholder shown wherever no image is set yet. The visual cue follows the product wherever it is shown.
Images carry through to kitting too. When you view a kit and its bill of materials, you see the kit’s own image plus each component’s image in the parts list, with a placeholder where a picture has not been uploaded. Whoever is assembling a kit can see exactly what each part should look like, which is one more guard against building the wrong thing. The kit list shows kit images too, and you can set a kit’s image straight from its bill of materials page.
Categories and search
As a catalogue grows, finding the right product fast becomes the bottleneck. Categories in Loaditude are free-form: type a label when you create a product, and the inventory list gathers every label you have used into a filter so long lists stay navigable and your reports have something to slice by. When you are looking for a specific item you can search by name or by SKU. And because a scan is matched against the product’s barcodes and its SKU as a fallback, a code on a box always leads back to the right catalogue entry rather than dead ending.
Stock levels across locations
A product is not held in one place, it is held in many. Loaditude tracks stock by location, so a single SKU can sit across several bins and you can see the quantity in each. The product’s inventory page totals what you hold and lists the locations that hold it, which is what lets picking send staff to a real bin rather than a guess.
Those location counts are kept honest as stock moves. When you adjust a location down to zero, it drops off the product’s active locations list and count automatically, and reappears the next time stock arrives there, so a product never reads as occupying more locations than it really does. Stock adjustments also work correctly on locations that hold stock for more than one owner, which matters when you share racking across clients.
Keeping these numbers accurate is a shared job between the catalogue and the floor: every receipt, transfer, adjustment and pack step updates the picture, and the catalogue is where that picture is read.
Why a well-built catalogue pays off
- Scanning just works because a product can carry every barcode it might present, with the SKU as a fallback.
- Pickers and clients trust what they see because images follow the product through inventory, kits and the portal.
- Stock reads true because levels are tracked per location and empty locations stop inflating the count.
- Nothing blocks the dock because a new SKU can be created mid-receipt.
Where to go next
- Picking and pick waves covers how this catalogue drives scan-verified order fulfilment.
- Goods-in and receiving covers receipting stock into the locations this page tracks.
- Warehouse reports and stock analysis covers turning your stock picture into reports you can act on.