The external vendor catalog in xWD is designed to help distributors manage not only their own items but also the potential items they have access to. These external items can come from pricing services such as the trade service (http://www.tradeservice.com)―or, if your vendor provides price sheets, you can create custom maps to import the vendor's items into xTuple ERP.
Once the xWD package is installed, you will need to configure the external vendor catalog. This configuration includes both fine-tuning the external vendor catalog settings and also populating the data in the external vendor catalog database. The external vendor catalog has a primary interface (for converting item sources), and it is also used in a fully-integrated way throughout the and modules in xTuple ERP.
