Finding products in the catalogs

BidCraft ships with the full Schluter catalog (~7,300 products) and the full Laticrete catalog (70 products) built right in. You can browse them, search them, and pull anything you need into a project or save it to your personal library.

You'll find the master catalogs in the sidebar under Catalog → Find Products, or directly at /catalog.

Two ways to look: browse or ask

The page opens on Browse catalog. There's a toggle at the top to switch to Ask AI and back, and it remembers whichever one you used last.

Browse catalog

This is the one to reach for when you know roughly what you're after.

• Search by name, item code, or supplier — type "Kerdi-Band", or a dealer item code, or just "Daltile" to see everything from that supplier
• Filter by type — what the product is: Field Tile, Mosaic, Trim & Deco, Slab & Stone, plus the installation categories like waterproofing, thinsets, grouts and trim profiles
• Filter by series — the collection name your supplier gave the line, like "Calgary" or "Cove"
• Filter by supplier — narrow to one manufacturer or one of your dealers
• Filter by price range — set a minimum, a maximum, or both

Results are paged, so a catalog with thousands of products loads quickly. On a phone, the filters sit behind a Filters button so the list gets the screen.

Search works the way you'd say it out loud

Type the words that describe the thing and search finds it — in any order, with or without punctuation.

• "honed 2x2", "2x2 honed" and "honed, 2x2" all bring back the same honed 2×2 mosaics. Search matches each word on its own now, so it doesn't matter what order they came out in or whether you typed the comma.
• Plain trade words work. "thinset", "caulk", "backer", "grout" — describe what you want rather than hunting for the brand name for it. Search understands what those words mean and shows you the right shelf.
• Ask for too much and it backs off gracefully. Search "modified thinset large-format" and if nothing matches all four words at once, you get the thinsets rather than an empty screen.

Same for the search on your own materials. It used to only look at names you'd typed yourself, which meant it found almost nothing — anything you'd saved straight from the catalog was effectively invisible. It searches the real product names and item codes now.

Type and series are two different things

Worth knowing, because a supplier price list only gives us one of them.

A series is what the brand calls the line — Calgary, Cove, Color Wheel Classic. It's useful ("show me everything in the Calgary range") but it doesn't tell you what the product is. Calgary could be a 24×48 floor tile or the bullnose that finishes it.

A type is what the thing actually is: field tile, a mosaic sheet, a piece of trim, a slab. That's the one you want when you're thinking "I need a mosaic for the shower floor" and don't care whose collection it comes from.

Both are filters, and they work together — Calgary and Trim & Deco gets you the bullnose and nothing else.

Type shows up as a small coloured tag under each product name. A few products don't have one: if we can't tell what something is with real confidence, we leave it blank rather than file it wrong and hide it from you. Those are still findable by search and by series.

Open a product to see the details

Click any product name and it opens beside the list — full screen on a phone, a panel on the side on a wide screen. Inside you get:

• The name, item code, supplier and series
• Retail — what the supplier lists it at. For tile stocked from Floor & Décor this reads Retail · Floor & Decor · as of [date] — the price on their website on that day.
• Your cost — what you pay, if the product is already in your materials
• Specs: size, finish, PEI rating, slip rating, applications, coverage — whatever the supplier published
• Add to materials, right there

Press Esc or the × to close it.

Your search and filters live in the web address, so you can bookmark a search you run often — or paste it to someone else on your crew and they'll see exactly what you're seeing.

Ask AI

Switch to Ask AI when you'd rather describe the problem than name the product: "what's the right thinset for porcelain on a wet wall?" or "I need a 1/2-inch round edge trim in brushed aluminum, 10 feet long".

Biddy is a product specialist trained on both catalogs. It knows which products are compatible, what coverage rate to expect per bag, and which trim profiles work with which tile thicknesses.

What Biddy can do in the chat

When you're chatting with Biddy on the catalog page, it can do a lot more than just look things up:

• Pull products into a project — "add 4 sheets of Kerdi to the bathroom remodel I'm working on"
• Calculate quantities — "how much thinset for a 60 sqft floor with 12x24 porcelain?"
• Save products to your library — "save this one to my library at $42 my cost"
• Compare alternatives — "what's the difference between Kerdi and Hydro Ban?"

If you have a project selected, Biddy uses the project's measurements and notes as context — so quantity calculations are real, not generic.

Your supplier's whole catalog, in your search

Schluter and Laticrete are the two catalogs everybody gets. But most of what you actually buy comes off a price list from your dealer — hundreds of pages of tile that no software has ever known about.

We can load one. Send us the price list your dealer gave you and we'll put the whole thing behind your search: every series, every item code, every size, with the prices you were quoted. After that:

• Search finds it. Type the series name or the dealer's item code and it comes up next to the Schluter results.
• You can tell which is which. Anything from your own price list is marked Your pricing, so you can see at a glance which rows carry the numbers you negotiated and which are standard list prices. You can also filter the whole catalog down to just one of your dealers.
• Biddy knows it. Ask for a 12×24 in a matte finish and it can answer from your dealer's range, not just the two built-in catalogs.
• Receipts match it. Those item codes are the same ones printed on the receipt from that dealer, so a scanned receipt lines up with the right product instead of guessing.
• Nothing joins your library uninvited. Your materials library stays the short list of what you actually buy — a product only lands there when you add it, or when a receipt or a proposal actually uses it.

[!note] A dealer price list is loaded for your business only. Nobody else using BidCraft can see it, search it, or see the prices in it. Those numbers were negotiated by you and they stay yours.

Want yours loaded? Ask us — it's a setup step we run on our end, not something you upload today.

Cross-manufacturer compatibility

When you look at a Schluter product, Biddy will automatically show compatible Laticrete products where it makes sense (and vice versa). This matters because the manufacturer cross-checks aren't always obvious — for instance, certain thinsets are approved with certain membranes, and certain waterproofing systems pair with certain crack isolation layers.

[!note] Compatibility info is sourced from manufacturer documentation. If you don't see a pairing, it doesn't necessarily mean they're incompatible — it just means it hasn't been verified yet.

Save to library

Every product you find has an Add to materials action (Save to Library in the chat). Rows already in your library say In your materials instead, so you won't add the same thing twice. Saving a product:

• Adds it to your personal materials library at /my-products
• Lets you override the price with your real cost
• Lets you tag it as a favorite-for-role so Biddy uses it on future jobs
• Lets you add notes (vendor, lead time, stock notes)

You don't have to save a product to use it — proposals can pull from the master catalogs on the fly. But saving a product is how you tell BidCraft "this is one of my go-to products, prefer it next time."

Pricing in the master catalog

The list prices shown in the master catalog come straight from manufacturer price sheets. For Schluter, these are the published list prices from the most recent import. For Laticrete, list prices aren't published the same way, so you'll see products without prices — you set the price when you save them to your library.

Some products show Price not listed instead of a number. That's deliberate and it's not a bug. Some price lists put several prices on one shared page, and when we can't tell for certain which price belongs to which product, we'd rather say so than attach a number that might be wrong and end up in a bid. Set your own price on those when you add them to your materials.

Retail and your cost are two different numbers

The catalog shows Retail — the supplier's published price, or for the tile we stock from Floor & Décor, the price on their website on the date shown. Either way it is not what you pay, and quoting it as if it were gives away your margin. Storefront prices refresh on their own (weekly for the ones you use, monthly for the rest); if one can't be checked, the last known price stays rather than going blank.

Your cost is what you actually pay, and it lives in your materials library. When you add a product from the catalog, BidCraft fills it in for you: it takes the retail price and applies the cost multiplier from your catalog settings (the standard discount off list you get from that supplier). It also tags the product with its type and records the unit your supplier prices it in — per square foot, per bag, per roll — so the cost in your library always says what it's per.

Both numbers are estimates until you confirm them — open the product in your materials and set the real figure any time. Whatever you type always wins; BidCraft never overwrites a price you've entered yourself.

If a catalog product has no published price, you get no cost either — not a zero. A material that says it costs nothing is worse than one that says nothing at all.

Next steps

• Build out the personal library that products you save flow into: Your materials library
• See how saved products feed into proposal materials: Materials lists explained
• Tag products as favorites for specific roles: Service materials and favorite-for-roles