BidCraft Tile
BidCraftTile
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2026-08-11

Tile is a category now — and you can click into a product

Field Tile, Mosaic, Trim & Deco and Slab & Stone are real filters. Catalog rows open for the full details. And adding a product to your materials fills in its type and your cost instead of leaving both blank.

Tile is a category now — and you can click into a product

We put a browsable catalog in front of you last week, and the first person to actually use it on seven thousand of his own products found three things wrong with it inside a minute. He was right about all three.

"I don't think Calgary is the category"

He wasn't wrong. The catalog was showing things like Calgary, MAGNIFIC and Bath Accessories Group 2 under a column marked Category, and none of those is a category. They're series — the name the brand gives a product line. Useful, but it doesn't tell you what the thing is. Calgary might be a 24×48 floor tile or it might be the bullnose that finishes it.

The deeper problem: there was no category a tile could go in. Every category in BidCraft was an installation material — thinset, grout, membrane, trim profile. Fine back when the catalog was Schluter and Laticrete. Useless now that a dealer price list is about 95% tile.

So there are four new ones:

  • Field Tile — the main body tile. Planks, 12×24s, subway, squares.
  • Mosaic — mesh-mounted sheets, penny round, hex, chevron.
  • Trim & Deco — bullnose, pencil, liner, chair rail, cove base, decos.
  • Slab & Stone — slabs, thresholds, sills, stair treads, coping.

And the series column is now honestly labelled Series, with its own filter, sitting next to a Type filter. Both are useful and they stack: Calgary and Trim & Deco gets you that line's bullnose and nothing else.

Every product gets worked out and tagged automatically. Where we genuinely can't tell — an item code with no words in it — we leave it blank rather than guess. A product filed under the wrong type is one you'd never find again, so a blank is the better answer.

Catalog rows open now

A product used to be a dead end: a name, a price, nothing else. Click the name now and it opens beside the list — full screen on a phone, a side panel on a wide screen.

You get the item code, the supplier, the series, the specs the supplier published (size, finish, PEI, slip rating, coverage), and Add to materials right there.

Retail and your cost, side by side

This one's worth being precise about, because the two numbers are easy to blur and expensive to confuse.

Retail is what your supplier lists the product at. Your cost is what you actually pay. The gap between them is your margin, and quoting the first as if it were the second hands it away.

So they now sit next to each other — in the catalog, in the product panel, and as a new Retail column in your materials list.

Adding a product actually fills it in

Before, adding something from the catalog stored the link and nothing else: no category, no cost. You'd open your materials later and find a row with blanks where the numbers should be.

Now it arrives filled in. BidCraft tags it with its type, works out your cost from the retail price and the cost multiplier in your catalog settings, and records the unit your supplier actually sells it in — per square foot, per bag, per roll.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A tile listed at $3.14 a square foot used to land in your library as "$2.83 each", which is a real-looking number that's wrong by the size of a piece. It now reads $2.83 per square foot, because that's what it is.

Two things it won't do:

  • It won't overwrite you. Anything you've typed yourself — your cost, your category — stays exactly as you left it.
  • It won't invent a price. If the supplier published no price for a product, you get no cost, not a zero. A material that claims to cost nothing is worse than one that admits it doesn't know.

Full walkthrough: Finding products in the catalogs.