I’d like to see the custom order, and it shouldn’t be hard to do. I’m
curious to see how you do the hierarchical stuff, as the pricing in
pERP is already annoyingly complex.
Hi Nathan,
SAP is annoyingly complex. pERP is just complex. 
Yes some parts of the price list are complex. If it wasn’t for the virtual machine allowing me to become a time-lord of sorts, I doubt I ever would have figured out how it works lol Being able to take a snapshot in time, make my changes, go forward to the future to try them out, and rewinding back to my snapshot as if it never happened was truly invaluable. I know I’m always singing the praises of virtualisation but I don’t know if enough people yet really get how amazingly helpful it is to developers! I got the price list stuff licked in under a day because of that.
I’m not sure I follow the need for extra metadata, but I guess it
depends on what sort of items you’re selling. Is there no acceptable
way to map your metadata to sales categories?
The custom order is the metadata, it won’t link to anything additional. It will just form part of the export, and become the hierarchical categories/product ranges which the products sit in.
Don’t forget that my current client is more retail than manufacturing. As all their shops fall in to one of three types (eBay, Amazon or website), I need only create 3 filters which can take the price list data (the products, their details, price, the categories they sit in - and the category metadata) and mash it up in to a format that the target wants. As there are 4 eBay stores, one eBay filter can be used to cater for all four. eBay only wants data sending to it in one format regardless of which store you’re updating. This approach is far more flexible and reusable than custom writing a filter for each actual price list. It will also allow other users to integrate pERP with their own eBay and Amazon stores. I doubt though the website filter will be of any use to anybody else as my client uses their own ecommerce websites that are custom made and no other user of pERP will use the same system. But having pERP price lists drive your eBay/Amazon stores is a good feature to behold.
I’d advise using one price list per site (per category), then look
into the price calculations to keep them up to date (if there’s any
plan to how they price). The design for the pricing system should be
able to handle multiple sales areas (might map well to websites),
multiple levels per area (A,B,C level customers), multiple sales
categories, multiple currencies, with items and pricing different for
each combination. They couldn’t just use a multiplier… that would
be easy.
Maybe all those different combinations should be changed to use a more
flexible category system? I’m open to suggestions.
This is how things stand with their configuration…
Sales Areas:
xxx eBay store
yyy Amazon store
zzz eBay store
aaa Custom website
bbb eBay store
ccc Custom website
ddd Amazon store
etc.
Sales Types:
Retail
Trade
Sales Categories:
Default
The sales categories isn’t really needed by this clients configuration so everything sits in a Default entry. With the configuration above there are 7 x 2 x 1 = 14 possible price lists. Not too bad for a retailer with so many outlets, and the trade prices are only available on a few stores. Because some stores contain all their stock, and some stores are selling a specific brand (and thus only contain a small amount of their total inventory), they need to be able to choose how the products are categorised on that particular store.
Their websites may be categories by product type: “plain widget” or “super widget”. The custom hierarchical ordering I’ve suggested will form the basis of this, and all the products in the price list will fall in to one, or both, of the “plain widget” or “super widget” categories.
Additionally, they have an eBay store which specialises in only selling “plain widget”. In this instance, their custom hierarchical ordering would be best categorised by manufacturer brand. So their categories specific to that price list may be “Brand X”, “Brand Y” and “Brand Z”.
…
To use a real-life fake example, WalMart company decides pERP is so great they want to use it. They sell their products on their website and they have a few eBay stores too. Their website lists ALL their inventory, so it’s categorised by what the product actually is. Categorising it alphabetically would mean that Nettle Soup was next to Newspapers. Nonsensical at best! So in their price list they now create Food -> Frozen -> Ready Meals. They also have Food -> Fast Food -> Ready Meals category, and all their TV dinners are mapped to both categories in that price list. When it’s exported to their main website, all the categories appear with all their products inside them, and some products are found in more than one place - just like in a real store.
WalMart has two eBay stores, one selling just ready meals and one selling anything that’s frozen food. Their ready meals store will be categorised by what flavour meal is. Having them all in one category called Ready Meals would be pretty pointless. So the price list for this store has categories in like Fish Supper, Macaroni and Cheese, Lasagne, etc. etc. So when this price list is exported to this eBay store, the subset of inventory (just ready meals) is now categorised for this store by flavour.
On their second eBay store selling all their frozen food, they sell a bit more stock than just ready meals in the store above, so it’s daft to categorise everything by flavour. So they have categories for Ice Cream, Lobsters and also again have a category for Ready Meals as it is a frozen foodstuff.
So looking at their inventory, they have one fish supper TV dinner from one supplier. In WalMarts own inventory it’s filed away in an obscure category called “Long life microwave frozen meals”. That’s never published. But in the price lists, that same product is sold in 3 different stores, for 3 different prices. Each store has that product listed in a category which is custom to that price list and where that price list will be published to. The system I am proposing to create shortly would enable this fish supper to sit in different categories for different price lists, regardless of how their inventory actually has it categorised for internal management. No sales point lists different goods alphabetically, it would be madness to do so.
I hope I’ve made sense with all of this. Please let me know if you would like any clarification. I will leave it with you to ponder.
Kindest thanks,
Paul
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