Forum Moderators: buckworks
Business Description:
2 retail stores clothing stores in the same town connected with a wireless bridge.Est. 1914
Mail Order via a printed catalog est. 1949 and website est-1996. (e-commerce and brick = click & mortor)
Business solution/software wanted: An integrated POS solution which will run the stores (computerized inventory) and process mailand web orders... From one central data base.
More specificly:
We would like a product/customer/shoping cart database residing at the weblevel of our entire product inventory: in stock, on order, on order/in stock showing 'committed' for a mail order (available and not available). Web orders and store sales at the registers would work from the same (one) data base.
Is it in stock.
Customers should be able to check their order status on the site. What is the status of my order?
Search the entire product line.
Accounting included is not neccesary but would be nice.
Stock split lists between the two stores and shared inventory.
If an item is ordered that we are out of the system should look for 'on order' purchase orders and tie to the PO with a Mail Order Number. If the item is not on order the system should start purchase order for the appropriate vender and mark the it with the Mail order number needing the item.
[edited by: Woz at 7:35 am (utc) on May 19, 2003]
[edit reason] no URLs please. [/edit]
Bets of luck :)
taking that out of context makes it fun. sorry, i can offer any advise.
Before I came to the web exclusively, I managed a business very much like what you describe: we had 5 street stores, a mail order catalog and a fledgling website.
Our experience with trying to implement an integrated data system was that the software was fine - any one of many packages could have done the job. The challenge is the human systems that are essential for keeping the data system working accurately. Even worse, employee turnover in retail made data system training a nightmare for us.
Issues like keeping an accurate perpetual inventory and coordinating it with both the shipping/receiving systems and the general ledger accounting -- things like that were nearly crippling for our not-so-big enterprise. Unless you're carrying a lot of inventory, then you need to be pretty sure that a report of "2 units" or "3 units" in-stock is accurate. That is not at all easy in an active multi-location business!
So whatever you purchase, plan your migration very well, and definitely migrate in modular bits, not all at once. If your legacy data systems are already smooth for you, then you have a head start.
You may want to watch out for system latency with all those cash registers and servers from your various profit centers accessing and writing to a central database in real time.
If your web pages are waiting too long to get data from the central db, then the page loads can be too long for your online customers. So, in addition to the software, plan the hardware side well so it can cope with the demand.
