It Slices, It Dices, and… It Prepares your Products for Sale Online!

Posted on | October 1, 2006  
Writen by | Ian Griffith

Story by Ian Griffith on 10/1/2006
One of the biggest challenges a store faces in setting up an ecommerce website is linking the inventory online with changes that occur in the store. If you plan to list more than 500 items online it doesn't make sense to manually update the pricing and availability of these items. The solution is to automate the maintenance of your product listing so you can spend your time promoting products, rather than manipulating data.

We often come across stores who have embarked on a website project with a local designer only to stumble on the challenge of aotumating the maintenance of your product. Fortunately we have a tool specifically for this task; eStage reads the store inventory into a spreadsheet style layout where you can slice and dice your inventory and prepare this data for listing online.
eStage is a piece of software that sits on the same network as your point-of-sale POS system. In a typical installation eStage can read all your products and pricing directly from your POS inventory files. It provides tools for Filtering your products by store category, size, and price. You can perform Group Edits on products to classify them by region or grape, disable them from the website, or establish web-only pricing if you choose. Promotions like “New Arrivals” or “Closeout Items” can be created within eStage to simplify an administrative task that often involves marking products one-by-one on the website.

There is also an option to switch the view to Virtual Inventory where you can browse products available from wholesalers in your market. These products can be filtered by wholesaler and you can establish a markup over the wholesale frontline price to sell these products online. This potentially adds thousands of products that complement your store selection without committing them to your inventory.

We have an interface to most of the common liquor industry POS systems, and while some platforms have idiosyncrasies about how the data gets into eStage we been very successful in automating this ecommerce task. Some POS systems sell an additional website module that exports a file to a specified location; however, this model requires the store uses fields available in the POS to enhance products for the web. This presents limited options especially when it comes to the display of images and ratings, or managing discounts and pricing.

At Beverage Media we use a modified version of eStage to provide matching from a store SKU to our ProductID which is linked to labels, ratings and regional classification. These matches help stores that are using virtual inventory ensure that only the store version of a product shows online instead of both the store and virtual item. While eStage is available with a subscription to publish the market data online, it is particularly powerful when coupled with a website Powered by the Beverage Network.

To learn more about how the Beverage Media can help with a website for your retail store or wholesale operation, contact Ian Griffith at 212 571-3232 x318, or visit www.bevnetwork.com/retailweb.
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