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Scenarios

Border Concepts: a complex assortment

One PO line that's really 27 sellable products — how to model a multi-product assortment so cost and inventory land in the right place.
Worked example. This walks a real order from the garden-center vendor Border Concepts. It's the textbook "complex assortment" case — and a good way to see how Tangerine Star handles a purchase order whose lines don't map one-to-one to the products on your shelf.

What arrived

A Border Concepts order came in with a single line item that read, roughly:

Rainforest Assortment — Sinhara Planter (sets of 3), Lanka Planter (sets of 3), Kayan Planter (sets of 3), Assorted Colors. Wholesale $1,799.10.

One row on the PO. But on the shelf, that's 27 distinct sellable planters — three styles, in sets of three, across assorted colors. This gap between how the vendor invoices and how you sell is what we call a granularity mismatch, and it's extremely common in gift, garden, and home verticals.

The challenge

If that single line were received as-is, you'd have one mystery product worth $1,799.10 and no way to scan, price, or count the actual planters. Two things have to happen correctly:

  1. The one line has to become the 27 real products you put on the shelf.
  2. The $1,799.10 cost basis has to spread across those 27 so your margins and counts stay honest — no cost invented, none lost.

How Tangerine Star handles it

The structure of an assortment is established with the AI helper, in conversation — not guessed from the line text. You tell the helper the real shape ("three planter styles, sets of three, these colors"), and it builds the individual products for you.

Establish the real structure

In the AI helper, you describe the assortment. It creates the 27 child products under one assortment family — each its own sellable item with its own name, scan code, and price.

Cost flows by conservation, not guesswork

The $1,799.10 is allocated across the 27 children so the totals always reconcile: the piece count stays locked at what you actually received, and the sum of the children's cost equals the order's cost exactly. You never end up with a rounding leak or a phantom dollar.

Price and label

With real products in place, your pricing rules apply per item, and each planter gets a scannable label — so the assortment becomes 27 things you can actually sell and track.

This is the group-product principle in action: you help the helper establish the true structure once (piece count, styles, per-group quantity), and the deterministic engine handles the cost math so nothing drifts.

Next time you order it

Once those 27 products exist, the next Border Concepts order recognizes them. Each planter matches back to the product you created — a confident reorder — and the quantities flow in automatically.

That recognition is reorder detection — see exactly how Tangerine Star decides what's a reorder versus something new.

Concepts this scenario uses

Scenarios

Real orders from real merchants, worked end to end — the best way to see Tangerine Star in action.

Catalina: multi-SKU products, part 2

A multi-line product with components — when several PO lines together make up one thing you sell.