There must be an efficient way of doing this?

[christina]

Advice on how to streamline the below is greatfully received!

We sell gifts, the majority of the business being to the trade. Using Actinic v.9 business we have

- wholesale website
- 4 retail websites

The products across the websites are slightly different although there are many common products.

I use Sage Instant Accounts for raising invoices for our wholesale customers & at the moment retail orders are entered manually on sage as batch invoices with the original invoice being generated in actinic.

I want Actinic & Sage to talk to each other to save manually entering invoices & understand this is quite simple to sort via sage-link?

Also, I need the warehouse stock control to be managed in one place. Can Sage talk to actinic so that when a product is out of stock every actinic website shows it as such (although it would be handy if the wholesale website was excluded from stock monitoring).

The ability to process orders from all the actinic sites in one place would be great.

Finally, I'd also like to be able to upload listings to amazon, play etc using the same stock monitoring & just to make things a bit more complicated, not all the products are to be listed on 3rd part sites.

I'm sure all the above must be possible but I'm really not sure where to start Excel imports? tradebox? mole end?

Help!

Thanks
Chris

[leehack]

Have 1 wholesale site and 1 retail website. Have the retail website so that it is split into 4 different areas of shopping, yet a customer stays on the same overall site. One site to maintain, one site for visitors to use and most importantly a unified cart across all products.

Sounds like your sites are split for no other reason than 'because you can', even more so if products are very similar, that points even more to the fact that they should be altogether. You can run 4 (or as many as you want) from all within the one main site. Splitting out sites when using actinic often means nothing more than more time and hassle doing everything.

[christina]

Hi Lee,

The retail sites have to be seperate as some are co-projects with other sites (like the one you did some work on for me). More splitting is required for one of them to create US, Canadian & British versions of the sites. Because of licensing restrictions, different distributors in different countries & drop-shipping arrangements there will be some product variation across the different country based sites, even if the overall site branding & product theme remains the same.

There must be a way of pulling it all together in a back-end solution?

[leehack]

There must be a way of pulling it all together in a back-end solution?

Not for what you are looking to do i'm afraid AFAIK, Actinic is static and not dynamic in that way. If someone wanted to order a product from each of the 4 stores, they would need to checkout 4 separate times. It just doesn't unify in that way, likewise with stock monitoring. With the need for country specific sites on the horizon too, I think you might need to start looking at other packages if these features are key to you.

Are you saying the joint ventures have to be sitting on different URLs, if not then you could as i say create one unified site (see this as the high street) and then have as many shops within it as you wish. That gives you unified cart, products, processing and stock monitoring.

[christina]

Thanks for your input Lee. As a temporary bodge is there a way of producing a stock report out of sage into excel & then feeding this info back into each site manually?