For people with both online and 'real' shops - stock control questions?

[BevS97]

I work for a shop with a storefront and 'in person' customers throughout the day, and we also do internet sales, at the moment they are about equal in terms of sales. We have got an EPOS system which monitors our stock levels in store, and we put all the internet orders through the EPOS till so it has fairly accurate stock levels in it, but our Actinic system doesn't currently have any stock control beyond me manually removing items as they are found to be out of stock. In an ideal world this would be as the last item was sold, but all too often it is when the item has been ordered but doesn't exist. Currently we are finding about 15% of the items ordered online are actually out of stock, which is just too many.

I see that Actinic are launching an EPOS system but not for a while, so we need to come up with a solution in the meantime. Our current rather manual system just isn't working.

We are trying to work out how best to manage this, and I wondered what sort of systems other people have in place?

We have considered putting lower stock levels into Actinic, so if we receive 25 of something, then we enter 12 into Actinic, but I am concerned that we would flag something as out of stock and miss a sale on something that is sitting on the shop floor.

Sorry, this is quite lengthy - just interested in other solutions to this dilemma

[Kermy]

We're in the proces of finishing a stock system which uses barcodes, and reads the product data from the Actinic database. Each product has a barcode associated with it as a custom property, so all items on every order must be scanned before dispatch. Once the order is complete, the system automatically decreases the stock level by the correct amount - all we have to do is perodically upload to make sure the stock levels are OK.

[BevS97]

So do you scan and enter all your 'instore' sales as well?

[NormanRouxel]

Bev,

If your EPOS system is Top 2 Toe (much used in Sports, Fashion, Footwear), then you can completely build the Actinic site from your EPOS data using Norcat, a program I developed that is designed to let you maintain your entire Actinic website within the EPOS application. See www.drillpine.biz/norcat for more info.

[Kermy]

Yes, if we sell an item instore it is scanned, and a new payment is entered into the system. It means we can view both online and offline orders through Actinic or through our own system, and stock levels are maintained however many PCs we use for uploading / downloading / processing.

[BevS97]

Thanks Norman that sounds good, unfortunately we are using FirstEpos.

[NormanRouxel]

It was a slim chance. It's a pity that EPOS in the UK seems to come from a score of companies, all with 5% of the market. If there was a clear leader I'd have had a go at porting my Actinic interface over to it.

[Mike Hughes]

If firstepos can export your stock levels to a CSV/excel file then you can get actinic to link to the stock levels in that file rather than using it's own database.

Actinic can probably link to the firstepos database directly, but I prefer to use an intermediate step to prevent one program from messing up the other and to avoid file access problems/slowness when they're both acessing the same file at the same time.

Mike

[BevS97]

If firstepos can export your stock levels to a CSV/excel file then you can get actinic to link to the stock levels in that file rather than using it's own database.

Actinic can probably link to the firstepos database directly, but I prefer to use an intermediate step to prevent one program from messing up the other and to avoid file access problems/slowness when they're both acessing the same file at the same time.

Mike

How would this work? We run a nightly export to a CSV and then Actinic uses that to update the stock levels? How do I point Actinic to it? And I guess (and this would be true for all linked systems) I need to amend all the Product References so that they match the BarCoded Product Ref Epos uses?

[Mike Hughes]

How would this work? We run a nightly export to a CSV and then Actinic uses that to update the stock levels? How do I point Actinic to it?

Yes, pretty much.

I think the details on how to do this are in the actinic help menu. You'll need the Business version of actinic as I believe it isn't supported in catalog.

Mike

[HD Direct]

We have ours linked to the database that our epos uses, if stock is tight though it's still possible that someone comes into the "physical" shop and buys a product before you pick it, meaning that it's not there to fulfil the order, dont think any software will solve that one though.
Our main problem now though seems to be when stuff is wrongly entered or if people with sticky fingers visit.