Real Time Stock: How to get the most out of it?

[maroni35]

Dear all,

I have two questions for you with regard to the new real time stock in v10.

The actinic system works on the assumption that you have one channel of ordering through Actinic. In more complicated scenarios how are people implementing Real time stock monitoring?

Details: We have an Actinic website selling all our products, we have a smaller actinic website selling a subset of those products. Also sell via telephone which is not run through actinic. We have a completly seperate database which holds our stock information. So it is not possible to have actinic in charge of overall stock.

Secondly is it possible to vary the message/wording for if an item is out of stock? As I would like to vary the wording. Some of our suppliers are in UK so some products are on a short turn around others from US on a consolidated shipment so take longer. e.g.

scenario A: Sorry this item is out of stock, please check back next
scenario B: Sorry this item is out of stock, expected mid June

[malbro]

Dear all,

I have two questions for you with regard to the new real time stock in v10.

The actinic system works on the assumption that you have one channel of ordering through Actinic. In more complicated scenarios how are people implementing Real time stock monitoring?

Details: We have an Actinic website selling all our products, we have a smaller actinic website selling a subset of those products. Also sell via telephone which is not run through actinic. We have a completly seperate database which holds our stock information. So it is not possible to have actinic in charge of overall stock.

Secondly is it possible to vary the message/wording for if an item is out of stock? As I would like to vary the wording. Some of our suppliers are in UK so some products are on a short turn around others from US on a consolidated shipment so take longer. e.g.

scenario A: Sorry this item is out of stock, please check back next
scenario B: Sorry this item is out of stock, expected mid June

One way would be to define a custom variable, set it to default to the most used message say A then in the product layout change the code to use the custom variable to select which of two text strings you want to display. For each product that needs a different value change the value in the variable to B. You could put the text in the variable but that means a lot of typing if you change more than a couple of products from standard.

[maroni35]

Thanks Malcolm,

I'll see if I can do that, last did custom vars in v7 so will be a bit of a jump!

David

[Darren B]

Im not sure with the new stock bits of V10 but can you not link the stock quantity to your external DB?

[maroni35]

That was what I was thinking, if anyone had noticed any issues with the stock monitoring and an external database, before I tried to do it, but looks like I'll have to try it out in anger on a test site.

[Duncan Rounding]

It should work fine. Be aware that if you break the external linking in the future your stock values will revert to the original values held in the database prior to linking. There may also be a some impact on database performance with external linking. Give it a go, it's not difficult to set up.

[SolSearcher]

I've just spoken to Actinic support about external spreadsheets and Version 10.
I am running Actinic 8 multisite, I have two site's selling some of the same products so I have been using an excel spreadsheet and linking both sites to it, that way I can centralize the stock levels. I have also been using Mole-Ends one stop automation, this then checks for orders every five minutes and will upload if an order is recived keeping both sites as up to date as possible.
I thought Version 10 would be the right move for me as it is really important for me to keep stock levels correct.
They have just told me that I cannot have an external spreadsheet conected to 1 site while using live feed stock levels let alone 2. I'm a bit gutted really.

They have told me to checkout the help file for a full run down.

Support was very helpfull, I'm just glad I called before running ahead with Version 10.

[Duncan Rounding]

I'm surprised at this. I thought that the live stock updated the local stock when downloaded. I can't understand why the local value can't be in an externally linked file or database.

[SolSearcher]

That's what I thought, just checked the help files and here's the answer:

Note: Automatic Stock Synchronisation cannot be used if your catalogue is linked to an external database or spreadsheet. If you wish to use Online Stock Control with External Linking, you should disable Automatic Stock Synchronisation, and Publish to Web on a regular basis to synchronise stock between the web site and the desktop.

[malbro]

That's what I thought, just checked the help files and here's the answer:

Note: Automatic Stock Synchronisation cannot be used if your catalogue is linked to an external database or spreadsheet. If you wish to use Online Stock Control with External Linking, you should disable Automatic Stock Synchronisation, and Publish to Web on a regular basis to synchronise stock between the web site and the desktop.

Seems a bit odd as you can use V10 with the EPOS system and have live updates running but stock controlled by EPOS using the EPOS link. The EPOS link allows stock changess from the web site to reflect into EPOS and stock changes in EPOS to reflect in the stock status on the web site. I know this works as I was using the V10 beta and EPOS when testing the stock updating on the web, so all that should be needed is an equivalent to the EPOS link!!

[cbarling]

I'm sorry that it doesn't work for you in this case.

The reason it works this way is for performance. To get stock synchronisation running really fast, we have to know what's changed and just upload the changed values. Uploading everything every time on large sites isn't feasible.

With external linking, we don't know what has changed, as its controlled from outside.

Chris

[maroni35]

Dear Chris,

I can see your argument about large sites but you have taken the choice away from those with smaller sites. My main site is large (5000 plus) and needs more careful management but the smaller niche ones have 30 or so products and I would quite happily let them run in the background grabbing info from the main linked database.

A work around that I have been using for some time is to run a scheduled task routine every night for these smaller sites anyway. This compares the Access database stock record with our external database knocks the stock down to 0 if need be and then uploads the site. It means the sites are running for no more than 12 hours with items that have gone out of stock. Your stock solution would have knocked this down to minutes so seemed quite good on paper.

Not wishing to be off topic about stock but is this a method you are considering for customer accounts? Since we can't use this feature at the moment because again Actinic is not our only channel.

[cbarling]

We plan a similar method for customer accounts, but details aren't sorted out yet.

Sorry about the implications of all this. I guess that you could run the different sites in different ways. You could also update the stock then refresh the site, then rely on RTS until the next refresh - I guess that it all depends on the velocity of the stock movements outside Actinic.

Chris

[SolSearcher]

I am using an excel spreadsheet with links to just 'product reference', 'stock' and 'Price'. I have two sites sharing this spreadsheet. If I was to have the spread sheet in a shared folder and have two computers with a site open on each and connected to a live feed, would this slow the system down to an unworkable speed?

[Duncan Rounding]

I'm not sure you would be able to have two 'connections' to the spreadsheet at once anyway. I think it will be first come first served. There's no mechanism to my knowledge that will allow multiple updates at the same time.