Skip to content
P

Buyer quickstart

Sign up as a buyer (PIC), receive product grants, browse your catalogue, and request supplier onboarding.

This tutorial walks a Product Information Consumer (PIC) — a retailer, distributor, or restaurant chain — from an empty account to browsing supplier product data and requesting new suppliers to onboard. It takes about 15 minutes.

Before you start

You need an invitation token for your buyer organisation, issued by a PIE platform admin or your own admin console.

1. Register and land in the app

Open the buyer app at /register/<token>. The preview shows your organisation and role; set a password and submit. On success you land authenticated in the dashboard.

2. Confirm your organisation settings

In Settings, confirm your organisation name and plan tier. The tier governs your API rate limits and entitlements — see Plans & limits.

3. Invite your team

Go to Team → Invite and invite a colleague as a pic_subscriber. Subscribers can read products from producers who have granted your organisation access, but cannot manage users or onboarding. A pic_admin manages the org, owns onboarding quality profiles, and configures your own AI provider settings. See Roles & permissions.

4. Understand grant-scoped catalogues

A fresh buyer organisation sees an empty catalogue. You only see a producer's products once that producer grants your organisation access to them. This is enforced by grant-aware row-level security in the database — not by filtering in the UI — so there is no way to reach ungranted data by changing a URL or calling the API directly.

Once a producer grants you access (see the Producer quickstart, step 7), refresh your catalogue and the granted products appear.

5. Browse and search

Open your Catalogue. Browse granted products and open a product detail page. Run a search — results are grant-scoped and locale-aware, so you see product data in your enabled locales and never see products you were not granted. See the Products guide for the localization model.

6. Request a supplier to onboard

When you need product data from a supplier who is not yet on PIE, use supplier onboarding. As a pic_admin you create an onboarding request — optionally pinning a quality profile that the submitted data must satisfy — and send a scoped link. The supplier submits their data without needing a full account; on approval, real products land in your granted catalogue.

You can pre-configure your own AI provider settings so the field-mapping step uses your keys. See the Onboarding guide and the AI guide.

7. Integrate via the API

Pull product data programmatically:

  • Create an API key from the API Keys page (start with a sandbox key — it is read-only and safe to experiment with).
  • Read Authentication, then Pagination for list endpoints.
  • Subscribe to Webhooks so your systems are notified when granted product data changes.
  • Explore every endpoint in the API Reference.

Next steps