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What this page is for

A Channel is a route to market — a way your products reach customers (for example, Retail, Wholesale, or E-commerce). This page is the management table for your channels: a spreadsheet where you review and edit every channel and its per-product setup in one place. It is the same channel entity you see in the network view; this is simply the spreadsheet-style place to manage them.
Note: “Channels” is the default name and may be renamed for your company. The behavior is unchanged.

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What you set up

ColumnWhat it controls
NameThe channel’s label.
TypeDummy — a Spherecast-native placeholder you create for planning. Actual — synced from your ERP.
Sell-by daysThe channel’s shelf-life window: how many days a product stays sellable in this channel. Can be overridden per product.
Sales repThe person responsible for the channel.
Forecasting enabledWhether the channel participates in forecasting and demand planning.
ActiveWhether the channel is currently in use.

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How it works

Each channel also carries per-product setup, so you control which products sell where and when:
  • Eligible products — the products allowed to sell in this channel.
  • Launch date and phase-out date — per channel, when a product’s demand starts and stops in that channel.
  • Royalty — a flag marking products that carry a royalty in this channel.
  • Planning status — a simple progress marker: Untouched, In progress, or Done, so you can track which products you’ve finished setting up.
Keep two ideas separate:
  • Launch / phase-out is about timing — the start and end of a product’s life in a channel.
  • A demand profile is about shape — the seasonal curve of demand across the year. See Demand profiles.
A product can have a launch date (when it begins) and a demand profile (how its demand is distributed) at the same time — they answer different questions.

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Step by step: set up a channel

  1. Find the channel’s row, or add a new one.
  2. Set the Type, Sell-by days, Sales rep, Forecasting enabled, and Active values.
  3. Use Add eligible product to list the products allowed in this channel.
  4. Use Add launches / phase-outs to set when each product’s demand starts and stops here.
  5. Add rule to define channel-specific logic, and set a royalty flag where it applies.
  6. Update each product’s planning status as you work so the team can see progress.

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Row actions

  • Edit and Delete — you can only delete Spherecast-native (Dummy) channels. ERP-synced (Actual) channels are deactivated at the source, not deleted here.
  • Add rule, Add eligible product, Add launches / phase-outs.
  • Transition — turn a dummy channel into a real one once it exists in your ERP.

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Example

You create a Dummy channel called “New Retail” while a store rollout is still being finalized. You mark three products as eligible, set a launch date of March 1 for each, leave phase-out blank, and set sell-by days to 90. As you finish each product you flip its planning status to Done. When the channel goes live in your ERP, you use Transition to make it a real channel.
Tip: Use planning status as your checklist — sort or scan for anything still Untouched or In progress before you finalize a cycle. See also Markets, Demand profiles, and Network channels.