DROP SHIP SUPPLIER INVENTORY REPORTING
We are looking for participants in a (free) Beta program for a new service we are developing. We expect the beta program to run for a couple of months.
Are you unable to keep up with dropship supplier price/cost changes every day?
Do you want to offer products on your store as soon as they are available from your suppliers?
Do you ever get an order for a product only to find that your supplier has discontinued the product?
As an actual customer for several suppliers for 8 years we have had problems keeping our stores in sync with our vendors. Most notably we did not accurately know when a supplier:
- added new products or product lines for sale
- removed products from sale
- changed our cost for a product
- changed the MAP or list price for a product
- changed the weight for a product
- ran out of stock on a product.
All of these things are critical as they control whether products were available and were sold at a profit. As is becoming common in our business, all of our suppliers offer inventory files in one form or another (referred to as a "feed") that we could request as emails or that we could FTP from their server. These data files contained all of the information about all of the products that the supplier has available. This did not solve our problems since the data was not in a form that we could readily use. (Usually the data is formatted as a comma or tab delimited text file). Among other problems we found are:
- the data file as received from a supplier was not human readable
- each supplier's data file had a different column order and contents
- even when converted to readable form there was not any possible way to manually compare the supplier's data with our store data because there were too many products in the data file.
What we needed was some way to download the data files from our suppliers, compare this data with the previous data from that supplier and create a report showing the differences in the product data that we considered important.
This is the reason that we created our supplier feed report system. Features of the system:
- Gets the data feeds for all of our suppliers using an appropriate method for each supplier.
- Loads each data feed into a database.
- Compares new feed data with prior feed data.
- Creates a report for each vendor showing critical differences.
- Emails each report to the responsible person(s) in our company.
This system has proven to be so successful we thought that other companies would also find it useful. All data retrieval, storage, reporting and maintenance will be done on our servers. Reports will be emailed to you once a day at any time you specify.
After the beta period, and only if you approve, you can continue the service for a modest fee on a monthly basis. (Modest is around $10-$15)
With your participation I think we can provide a truly useful service. If you would like to try the service please email me at
willirl@gmail.com.
If you have questions, ideas or would like to discuss the service please reply to this post. We welcome your thoughts on the service.
Best regards,
Richard Williams
Rogue Wave Limited
PRIVACY POLICY
We will never use your company's data or the feed data for any purpose other than the preparation of your report.
