Hi - hopefully an easy one for you experts, but it's got me at a road-block.

I am setting up ODOO so grappling with the database concepts.  I have imported all our contacts, 172 in total - individuals and businesses, 70 of which are our vendors.  The Contacts database all works well and everything looks good.

Next we are trying too import all our products (mainly items / components used in our manufacturing).  We are preparing this in Excel and now I have got most of the fields mapped and working (testing with just 10 records for now).  I had to manually create a single 'test' product so I could use Studio to create custom fields for things like Manufacturer, Manufacturer Part number, Manufacturer URL and Vendor Part Number (which is the order code for the purchased part and normally different from the manufacturer part number - i.e. the supplier's order code or SKU).

My import spreadsheet has the Vendor entered for each record (for each product) in a column with title seller_ids and I am using the full (and accurately entered) name of the Vendor that matches the name in the Contacts model.  When I import the spreadsheet the seller_ids field automatically maps to Vendors and there are no errors shown when testing.  So the file is imported but when I look on the products detail view and the 'Purchase' tab, I would expect to see the Vendor appearing in the table under the 'Vendor' heading.  But this data is not there.  I can manually add a line and select from any of our contacts (including individuals and customers) and this data is retained, but is looks like the mapping between the imported product is not making a connection with the contacts table on import.

I have seen from searching AI that there is a setting in the contacts model for 'Is Vendor' or 'Is Supplier' but I can't find that field in debug mode, so maybe that's a ChatGPT error.

So, do I need to somehow force the contacts to be recognised as vendors, or do I need to format the column entry in seller_ids differently in the import spreadsheet?  I have tried using the reference format as well as the verbose name - like this: [(4, <contact ID>)] where <contact ID> is the id number from the contacts database export.  This didn't work either. 

I found a few forum posts over the years with users having the same problem but none of these had a solution that works.

Thanks for any help.