Inventory Mangement

Inventory Mangement Question

[shoonik]

Greetings All first of beeing my first post I have to say that this site has more website specific help that I ever found so far.

Okey how do you manage your inventory when you want to have hundreds of products. I fell in love with osCommerce. its a really nice piece of software (and its free) I have read and search and read but its been some time and I gave up and decided to ask. Is there a remedy to my problem. Or tell me how to host a estore with a hundreds maybe thousands of items.

I have heard that you can batch upload mictrosoft excell sheet with the items on it and bam you have it.. I just think that theres an easier way to mange your inventory the doing one by one manualy.

So any piece of help would be greatly apreciated and this site rocks! I learned more in here.

[2_much]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Shoonik.

I also did quite a lot of research on this and came up with the same solution and another one called AbleCommerce.

I never ended up setting it up, so I can't give a reccommendation either way.

[Mark_A]

Hi shoonik - I was not going to reply to this but perhaps a short one .. I have been planning this for a site where the client is not yet ready for inventory or pricing to be online ..

The product section is directly derived from their company dbase so it has been planned to integrate pricing and inventory into product pages when needed.

I would consider how often each may need to be updated and certainly look to automate as much as possible ..

The sorts of questions include how direct is the link between the original location where the up to date stock record is maintained (total committed and available :-) and the location from which the "available stock" information is displayed on your site.

Then the transaction in its steps .... i.e. when / how does an order taken via your website get to deplete the available stock at the company and then display the reduced total back on the website ... etc etc

Depends a lot on what you are selling and in what sorts of quantities they sell ....

If you are an airline then integration will need to be somewhat more and faster refreshing than most online small business type applications :-) otheriwise lots of irritated customers may be trying to squeeze into the same seats :-)

[Marcia]

MIVA keeps inventory and I believe you can use an Excel spreadsheet upload. Check Westhost's deal on Miva ecom hosting - they've restructured and they have some great deals.

[TallTroll]

The prefered solution would be to link your ecomm site to a true ecomm / stock management system. The site need only be the web front end to your internal business systems.

This sort of solution also lets you do other cool things, like show specific prices per stock item per customer, and do proper analysis of sales, manange line items (especially where BOM is an issue) etc, etc

[shoonik]

Ok after doing extensive research I think Im either going to go with Able or osCommerce. :) osCommerce - free and AbleCommerce $1600. Im not worried about price as much as usebelity and functions easy of use etc etc. If anyone uses any of the shopping carts please help me make my desicion.

Thank you
God bless