Materials for B2B customers: price lists and product sheets without e-mail

A product sheet in PDF, the current price list, a certificate of origin, print-resolution photos for a leaflet. Sooner or later every customer asks for one of them — and it usually ends the same way: a salesperson digs the file out of a drive, sends it by e-mail, and two weeks later the customer asks again because the attachment got lost in their inbox. Or worse: they got a version from six months ago.

Why e-mail and WeTransfer do not scale

Sending files by e-mail looks like the simplest solution as long as you have a handful of customers. Then come the costs nobody counts:

• Nobody knows who has which version. You change the price list in April, and some customers keep ordering from the January file.
• The salesperson is the bottleneck. A request for a product sheet goes to a person, not to a system — and waits until Monday.
• Links expire. WeTransfer deletes the package after a week; the customer comes back to it a month later.
• Materials leak where they should not. A price list prepared for one chain reaches someone who should not see it — because an attachment is forwarded with one click.

A file repository: one place customers reach on their own

The alternative is simple: materials live in the system, in a folder tree, and customers download them in their own panel — the same place where they already place orders. They do not get an attachment, they get access. You change a file on your side and from that moment everyone sees the current version.

The structure is yours: “Price lists 2026”, “Product sheets”, “Certificates”, “Marketing assets”, with subfolders per product line. Nest folders as deep as you need and rearrange them when the offer changes.

The key part: who sees what

In B2B the point of a repository is not that files sit in one place — it is that different customers see different things. Marketing assets can be for everyone, but a chain-specific price list or distributor terms cannot.

That is why visibility is set on the folder, not on the file, and it has two levels:

• Publication — while a folder is a draft, only you can see it. Handy when materials are still being prepared.
• Scope — all customers of the company, or selected customer groups (the same ones you use for discounts).

There is one rule worth understanding right away: a folder is visible only when all of its parent folders are visible too. Hiding a parent hides the whole branch. Thanks to that, the path to a file never reveals that something exists which a given customer has no access to.

A material meant for everyone and a material meant for a single chain are two different commercial decisions. The system should tell them apart as clearly as it tells apart price lists.

Product images and attachments — without duplicated work

A separate trap is the material you already have in the system: product photos and PDFs uploaded to product cards. Copying them into the repository would mean two versions of the same file and a question about which one is current.

The saner solution is to show them in the repository without copying. A “Products” folder appears in the tree, with a subfolder for every product that has at least one image or attachment. Add a photo to a product and it shows up in the materials immediately. Delete the product and its subfolder disappears on its own. There is no synchronisation to remember.

That folder is read-only: product files are added and removed where they always were, in the product card. What you do control is whether customers should see product materials, and which of them.

How to organise it in practice

An order of work that saves you a cleanup later:

1. Start with what is for everyone. A general folder (product sheets, certificates, logos) shared with all customers covers most of the requests that reach salespeople today.
2. Only then build per-group folders. Price lists and terms go into separate folders attached to customer groups — not the other way round.
3. Name files for the customer, not for yourself. “Wholesale price list 2026 Q3” beats “pricelist_v4_final_fix.pdf”. The display name is separate from the file name, so nothing has to change on your drive.
4. Watch the downloads. The counter next to a file shows whether the material is used at all. A folder nobody opens for six months is usually not needed — or is badly named.

One thing to keep in mind: disk space

Marketing materials can weigh more than a whole year of orders. Print-resolution photos, PDF catalogues of tens of megabytes, product videos — it adds up fast. It pays to know upfront how much space your plan gives you and what counts towards it (in vendispace: repository files plus product images and attachments, with the split visible on the usage bar).

A practical rule: put materials that are ready to send to a customer into the repository, not your working archive. Keep design source files where they always were — customers will not open them anyway.

What changes after the rollout

The effect is unspectacular but noticeable within two weeks: requests to “please send the price list” simply stop arriving. The customer knows where to look and is sure the file is current. The salesperson stops being an attachment courier, and you stop guessing who has which version.

It is the same logic as with individual price lists: the more arrangements and materials live in the system, the less work is left in day-to-day service — and the customer serves themselves, at any hour.