Ordering Manager
Get New Products Online Immediately
Product Managers assigned to manage product information in a website or online store separate to the accounting system quickly discover the enormous challenge of maintain two inventory databases, particularly once the product database exceeds 200 products. Keeping critical information such as pricing and stock availability up-to-date in one system is often difficult enough, but it can quickly become a full-time job when you need maintain it in two. The potential to introduce errors is high and often results in loss of business or margin.
Therefore, most Product Managers favour a centrally managed integrated approach where the product data is mirrored from the accounting system into the online store. This is an ideal approach but complexities arise as accounting systems often lack the available data fields to properly showcase inventory items for displaying on the web.
Fortunately, the Live eCommerce Online Store offers both integration and flexibility by mirroring your products from your accounting system nightly and offering facilities to expand and enhance product online. The nightly update automatically adds and removes products as you modify the inventory in your accounting system. If new products are added, they are immediately ready for sale on the web the very next day. Pricing is also mirrored and kept up-to-date online.
Manage Your Online Products With Ease
Managing your online products starts from within your accounting system. This is where you set your product name, optional short description, unit of measure, pricing matrix, tax codes, stock and custom information. Furthermore, you can quickly activate or deactivate items from displaying on the web to turn off products that you do not wish to sell online. This is handy in case you have a few inventory products that are either too complex for the web, discontinued or service items such as labour or freight. If your accounting system adequately describes your products, then your online products can be entirely managed in the one place.
Managing basic product information may suit some commodity based businesses but for most, additional product information is required in order to sell the product. The easy to use My Inventory facility located within the Online Store Administration Centre allows you to manage the following for your online products:
- Detailed product information such as feature lists or descriptive text.
- Unlimited product images uploaded by you with automatic thumbnail generation.
- Supporting documentation (PDF, Word, Excel)
- Iconic flags to highlight a feature or status such as On Special or Whilst Stocks Last
- Related products to promote upselling.
You Can Sell To Some But Not Others
In a perfect world, all businesses would sell products to all their customers. This is true for some but often complex business models, commercial relationships, trading laws and other complexities place restrictions on the available range that a customer can purchase.
For instance, a wholesaler may wish to have a retail online store that sells 60% of their product range to the general public whilst they wish to sell 90% to account customers and 10% to specific accounts with exclusive arrangements.
Or, a distributor with one accounting company file/warehouse may stock inventory across several brands and would like to design and manage several retail websites selling products for each brand.
The Live eCommerce Online Store incorporates a powerful and flexible role-based permission system which offers unparalleled control over inventory security for online users and retail online store websites. Product Managers are empowered to create complex hierarchies of permission for their inventory within several easy steps. The following abilities can be configured:
- Can view product.
- Can add to cart.
- Check live backorder status.
- Can drop ship product.
No More Product Photo & Attachment Nightmares
Traditionally, managing product photos and attachments is often a slow and time consuming process. Resizing and optimizing photos is often cumbersome and becomes frustrating particularly for larger inventories in excess of 500 products.
The Live eCommerce Online Stores provides several facilities to aid in the upload and management of product photos and attachments.
- They can be uploaded individually or in batch (just choose a folder and off it goes
- Photos are resized for 3 different display sizes ranging from thumbnail, medium and large.
- There are no restrictions to the number of photos you can add for each product.
- Batch imports from CD are offered by our helpdesk.
To Flag Or Not To Flag
The Live eCommerce Online Store offers the following built in product flags (however custom flags can be configured):
- On Special
- Whilst Stocks Last
- New Release
- Discontinued
- Environmentally Friendly
Do You Want Fries With That?
Many companies sell products that complement others and vice-verse. Whether its optional accessories or complimentary products, cross selling is an effective way to boost sales.
The Live eCommerce online Store offer a facility to configure related items against any product. These items are listed below the details on the product details page with add to cart options if enabled.
Consolidate With Product Combinations
Searching through an online catalogue containing thousands of products can be quite a challenge for web users. Many products come in a range of combinations such as colour/size, length/width/height, length/diameter and so on. Therefore, collating these combinations into a virtual product SKU will dramatically reduce the size of searches. This in turn provides web users with an intuitive mechanism to add different combinations of products to the shopping cart.
The Live eCommerce Online Store offers an optional Product Combinations module which provides the administration facilities to create virtual SKUs and and configure combination profiles against them.
An Easy Way To Manage Categories
The product category tree is a fundamental part of any online store and needs to handle complex configurations. Category photos and descriptive text often enhance the browsing process and ensure the customer find desired products quickly.
The Live eCommerce Online Store offers two category management mechanisms whereby categories are either managed in the accounting system (restrictions apply) or in the category manager facility within the online store. In the later, you can even configure many-many relationships so an item can be assigned to 1 or more category paths. Regardless of the source location for category data, the category manager enables the upload and assigning of a photo and descriptive text.
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