Stock Control (again)

[freakmode]

Hi

I am just in the process of converting our shop over from another cart (We shall call it Ear Hole !!).

It is almost ready to go but I am having problems understanding how the damn stock control works. If I am running stock control on my products and have 10 in stock why am I allowed to add 20 to my basket even with back orders disabled?

I understand that you can have a work around by setting the maximum you can order to be equal to the amount of stock you have but surely this is a manual setting each time you sell an item, or am I missing something.

We recieve about 70 orders a day many from the USA overnight. We take products from our supplier when he has them in large quantities and we never know when he will have them in stock again so back ordering is not an option.

The old cart poles for new orders every 5 minutes and uploads the revised stock and works well ( about the only thing that does work on it)

Anyone shed any light.

Thanks

David

[Jan]

Actinic only updates stock levels when you upload the catalog,

ie. Order arrives, order is downloaded, offline catalog stock changes, catalog is uploaded, online catalog stock levels change.

Actinic does not reduce online stock levels as products are sold, the only way to limit stock online (other than uploading) is to set the max quantity orderable field for each product.

We have some utilities that help you manage stock levels (and also to process orders), the product will download orders, upload your catalog and set the max quantity orderable field to the number of items in stock at scheduled intervals, take a look at the URL below for more details and a free trial.

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/One...utomation.html

Regards,

[freakmode]

Thanks Jan

Looks like I may be buying some more product in order to get this to fly.

This seems a flaw in the Actinic design, are their plans to integrate this into the core product in the future?

[Howard Walker]

Stock control yet again

Jan said 'Actinic only updates stock levels when you upload the catalog. Download the orders, stock changes off line. Upload the catalog - stock changes on line

Where in the manual is that small gem mentioned?

It may well be true if you have the catalogue and the order processing on one computer. Not so if the catalogue is on one computer in the North of England and the orders are processed 230 miles further south on a different computer!

Order arrives, order is downloaded, offline catalogue stock changes on Southern computer but not on the Northern computer. Next time the catalogue is uploaded from the Northern computer, the stock levels revert to their original level!

In the meantime we have sold out of stock altogether and cannot replace it. Try explaining that to 25 irate customers.

No one mentioned that in the manual at all! So at the end of the day, our office has to email me with the figures, I have to update the stock levels on my machine, and then upload the catalog.

If the staff do an upload, the whole system dies, as their catalog is so out of date. The only solution that I can see is to do the whole lot on one computer - but as that is such a steep learning curve for our staff, it will be impossible.

Have I got it wrong?
If not, does anyone know a better way?

[freakmode]

Not having stock control at point of order - (I only have 3 so you can only buy 3) is grim. I know you could get around it by paying another £200 but why should I need to.

I think Actinic sales staff need to carefully explain the differences between stock management and stock control to potential new customers.

We have now scrapped our Actinic store and gone elsewhere as this issue is key to our business practice.

Anyone want a cheap copy of Actinic 6???

[Jan]

>I know you could get around it by paying another £200
Actually the stock control module of my automation module is only £59.99.

I've just checked through the help and it does seem to be a little misleading, I couldn't find a place where it said that you had to upload to take items out of stock. It doesn't however say anywhere that Actinic offers realtime/online stock monitoring.

It does say that automatic stock monitoring will be disabled if you choose to separate catalog maintenance from order processing.

> We have now scrapped our Actinic store and gone elsewhere as this issue is key to our business practice.
That is a real shame because your Actinic store looked really good, one of the best ones I have seen in a while, it was fast and would have made you a lot of money (In my humble opinion), seems a shame to throw all of that away for the sake of £60 (or even £200 for that matter), the time you spent in this thread was probably worth more than that.

Regards,

[Nadeem]

Hi there

This seems a flaw in the Actinic design, are their plans to integrate this into the core product in the future?

This will only be achievable, if Actinic produced a real time database for Stock monitoring. At the moment, Actinic is an offline product.

Chris has mentioned in another thread, the reason we chose this route for stock monitoring. Here it is:

One of the main reasons we have never implemented stock control in the way you describe is that if you got twenty small business owners in a room you would probably get twenty different opinions about when a product is 'out of stock'. For some, Actinic woks exactly as they need it, for others (like yourself) it falls short of the ideal.

After a lot of discussion in house we decided the we should have the default operation of the store as 'always being able to take orders' as we decided that orders are the important thing (though, of course, this is a problem if you are selling one-off items as a lot of our customers do).

The other problem is we were uncomfortable with building a feature that actually made it possible for people to come along to your store and place a fraudulent order for everything in it - thus taking your store down for a while until you rectify the problem.

Kind Regards

[Howard Walker]

It actually states :
Note that this Stock Monitoring dialog will be disabled if you have opted deselect Catalog Maintenance in the Allow On This PC dialog area. (See Allow On this PC)

This note is meaningless. I am operating the Catalog maintainance machine. The only box which is not ticked under Allow on this machine is Order processing. So when I look at a product, the stock monitoring dialog is active and working. What am I supposed to expect? That it does not work? If order processing is not allowed on a machine, then the Stock Monitoring should be disabled on that machine, not the other way round, which is what happens. That way it would at least point out even to someone like myself that the stock system does not work. Do I now have to throw away £450+ of software and around £2000 in developement time because of defective manuals and product descriptions? The sooner a proper manual is produced the better. I'm certainly looking for an alternative. In the meantime I'm stuck with doing stock records on a daily basis.

[Jan]

If you search the help for :

"Separating maintenance from order processing"

you will see that it says

"The process described in Transferring ownership of Catalog can also be used to set up Ecommerce so that one machine does nothing but upload the online store, and one machine does nothing but download orders from the online store. To do this, carry out the following steps:
Note that doing this will automatically disable Automatic Stock Monitoring"

Regards,

Jan Strassen

[Howard Walker]

Not in dispute Jan.

I saw that at first, but when the stock monitoring check box under product details/stock/stock monitoring on the machine that is doing catalogue maintenance was not disabled I just thought - Yet another mistake in the help file. Anyway, it should not be necessary to search the help file for such important information. It should be in the basic overview at least.

In my opinion, it is not a mistake, but at least an oversight or at worst a bug.

[Howard Walker]

Sorry - clicked the send twice.

[Gill]

The Quote:

One of the main reasons we have never implemented stock control in the way you describe is that if you got twenty small business owners in a room you would probably get twenty different opinions about when a product is 'out of stock'. For some, Actinic woks exactly as they need it, for others (like yourself) it falls short of the ideal.

This doesn't really matter if you give us real time stock monitoring but allow us to have an option to allow stock to be ordered even when out of stock.

The quote

The other problem is we were uncomfortable with building a feature that actually made it possible for people to come along to your store and place a fraudulent order for everything in it - thus taking your store down for a while until you rectify the problem

Other sites have real time stock monitoring and I've never heard of a site been taken down as someone has ordered everything in site. If you're monitoring the site (as we all are?), we can soon spot a fraudulent order like this and simply delete it which would put all those items back in stock.

The number of Actinic customers who are disappointed/surprised/angry at the lack of stock monitoring should make Actinic reconsider the decision they have made. This decision appears to have been taken by Actinic assuming their customers would agree with them.

A lot of us don't.

Perhaps a poll here would help?

[Jan]

Howard,

You could get around your problem by creating a hierarchical import file from the data on the orders machine, containing just the product reference and stock quantities, this could then be emailed to you daily and loaded onto your machine to allow the updates to be ok, also if you were using business and you could access the a drive on the orders machine via a network you could link an excel spreadsheet to the Actinic database and then link that to your machine via external linking.

None of these are ideal but might make your stock control montoring a bit easier.

Regards,

[Howard Walker]

Jan
Thanks for your suggestions. I will ponder upon them.
Meantime, lets hope that we don't sell any of our 'one offs'

[freakmode]

This will only be achievable, if Actinic produced a real time database for Stock monitoring. At the moment, Actinic is an offline product.

The solution we currently use is also an offline solution and has stock control at point of sale.

Actually the stock control module of my automation module is only £59.99.

But in order to run this automatically for overnight order processing you need to pay £200


The other problem I have trouble in getting my head around is the "create a master product" and then create all the product combinations and hide them.

We have nearly 1000 products in 8 sizes and 9 colours, some of these products may be in 2 sizes and only 4 colours.

Thanks to everyone who helped in trying to sort this out anyway, especially Norman for his excellent dynamic images patch.