How do I manage products from different vendors in my marketplace?

Upload your product feeds, vendor catalogs, price lists, and any documentation that describes your marketplace inventory. Chatref’s knowledge-base piece will ground your AI agent in those documents, so it can answer questions about vendor products, availability, and specs from a single source of truth. The agent will not make up information – it will always cite what you have provided. Update the knowledge base whenever a vendor sends new data, and the agent will reflect the changes immediately.

Set up custom actions that let your agent interact with your inventory system right inside the chat. For example, you can build a custom action that checks current stock levels for a vendor product, or one that adjusts a product’s quantity when a purchase is completed. You can even create an action that notifies a vendor if an item needs restocking. Because these actions are defined by you and triggered by the conversation, you keep full control over how marketplace inventory moves.

Automatically tag chat conversations based on vendor name, product category, or order status. Chatref’s conversation-tags feature helps you see at a glance which vendor products are generating the most questions, which categories need better documentation, and which approvals are pending. You can also manually add tags for custom workflows, like flagging a conversation where a vendor needs to provide more product details. Use these tags to filter the inbox and speed up your review process.

Because your AI agent is trained on your full product catalog, it can understand which category a product belongs to. Use conversation tags and routing logic to automatically sort chats by product category – electronics, apparel, home goods, or any custom taxonomy you define. When a customer asks about a vendor’s product, the agent can respond with category-specific details, cross-sell related items, or escalate certain categories to a dedicated team member, all without manual triage.

Combine ai-agents and custom actions to create a low-touch vendor product approval process. When a vendor submits a new product, an agent can check the submission against your guidelines (pulled from the knowledge base), ask the vendor any missing details, tag the conversation as “pending approval,” and then trigger a custom action to update your marketplace catalog once you confirm. This keeps multi vendor product management smooth and consistent, even as your vendor list grows.

How to update vendor products
Log into your Chatref account, go to your agent’s knowledge base, and upload the updated vendor catalog or product sheet. The agent will re-index and immediately reflect changes. You can also design a custom action – for example, one connected to your inventory platform – that lets you or a vendor update stock, price, or description by simply sending a message. Use conversation tags to track which updates were processed, so nothing slips through.

Managing product categories in marketplace
Your knowledge base already defines your product categories. The agent uses that structure to automatically recognize which category a conversation falls into. Set up conversation tags for each category, then either let the agent auto-tag incoming chats or do it manually. This way you can filter the inbox by category and review product questions in bulk. If you change your category taxonomy, update the knowledge base documents and the tags, and the agent will adapt.

Vendor product approval process
Train your agent on your approval policy document (part of the knowledge base). Then create a custom action that, when triggered, changes a product’s status from “submitted” to “approved” and updates your marketplace inventory. As new products come in, the agent can ask verification questions, flag missing info, and tag the conversation as “needs review.” You approve with a custom action, and the product goes live – all logged in Chatref’s conversation history.