Citrus Retail Development Blog

Amazon and eBay Integration

Our market place modules allow you to take your CitrusStore product catalogue to new sales channels. The Amazon module supports the following:

Automatic listing of products in the Amazon Marketplace;

Listing and delisting items as they come into or out of stock, fully automated without any visits to SellerCentral;

Automatic download of orders, including compatibility with with our Order Processing Module;

Automatically marks orders a despatched in Seller Central, saving hours of administration;

Full analysis of Amazon sales via our Executive Dashboard, so you can easily see if you are making any money.

The eBay module supports:

Automatic listing of products on eBay;

Listing and delisting items as they come into or out of stock, in real time via the eBay API;

Automatic download of orders, including compatibility with with our Order Processing Module;

Automatically marks orders a despatched in eBay, saving hours of administration.

Bulk Ecommerce Order Processing Module

The Bulk Ecommerce Order Processing Module is designed for customers processing large volumes of orders per day.

It significantly improves Microsoft RMS by providing batch processing for ecommerce and mail-order transactions. In summary the module:

1. Batches in Internet, Amazon and eBay orders as Microsoft Retail Management System (RMS) Worksorders, allowing real-time stock allocation, with no user intervention;
2. Provides a solution to build batched pick lists, with support for different pick formats including by customer order, by bin location and department and category;
3. Provides integration via our Courier Integration Module to most major courier systems;
4. Provides support for releasing deferred credit card postings as the goods are despatched;
5. Can integrate either with our ecommerce platform CitrusStore 2.0, or any other ecommerce platform allowing seamless order processing within RMS.

The system provides a significant cost saving over standard RMS Internet order processing, is less error prone and supports a proper pick and pack strategy.

Yet More Executive Dashboard Features…

We’ve added the much awaited product sales browser. This allows you to view top selling products in your current ‘Drill Period’. As always it picks up any filters already applied, so you can view sales within a department and category and then stack a supplier or sales channel on top of the current period. Awesome if we do say so ourselves :-)

Executive Dashboard – New Features

We’ve added a stack of new features to our Executive Dashboard product. These both improve the performance of the system on large reports (multiple million pound // hundreds of thousands of transactions) and add a whole stack of cool new features to put decision making information for multistore managers at their finger tips. We’ve also added some cool new stackable features for single site and ecommerce customers.

Want to know your margin for a suppliers products in a particular department and category, split down by channel (e.g. EBay)? You can now do this with ease for any store. As always this information is accessible securely from anywhere in the world. 

Screenshots:

Store Summary – Provides a scrollable snap shot of all sales across your stores for the last 30 days

Departmental Breakdown of all data in the current drill period

With one click zoom for more detail

New Graph Types for Enhanced Visualisation

Here we have drilled into a particular supplier, it this case Madison, looking at transactions sold by a particular channel – Amazon Market Place. The turnover, profit and margin and the average items in the basket are all specific to these drill down filters. We could also add filters for department and category for super detailed analysis of your sales by channel.

New Product - Executive Dashboard

The product brings together information from all of a retailers stores and shows real time retail KPI's. The solution is particularly appropriate for franchise or multi-site retailers as different users can be provided with access to selected store data on a secure basis.

The system uses Microsoft Silverlight to present the data in the browser so it is accessible from anywhere in the world. Whilst the demonstration is connected to Microsoft Dynamics RMS, it could be connected to any retail system.

Click here for a video

Purchase Order Planner Enhancements

We’ve added new functionality to our PO planner. New features include:

1. Row highlighting so you can see which row the mouse cursor is over;
2. Summary values for Current Stock Value, Order Value Est, Estimated Future and Stock @ Min and Max are not in consistent column format. This makes it easier to compare sub totals when you are grouping data;
3. Once you have customised the columns and filters you want to work with you can save this away, allowing you to setup predefined purchase order planner worksheets for different seasons, brands, suppliers etc;
4. Added better support for tabbing between Reorder Point (Min) and Restock Level (Max) fields removing a key stroke when defining values.

See a cool video highlighting all the best features.

RMS Purchase Order Planner

Purpose – The RMS Purchase Order Planner allows you to tailor your RMS Reorder Points and Restock Levels to target specific levels of stock holding and focus on lines with high levels of sell through. The tool allows you to work across your entire stock file, or focus in on specific suppliers, departments and categories or any grouping of these three fields.

The standard RMS product provides the functionality to raise purchase orders based on Reorder Points and Restock Levels, sometimes referred to as min/max levels.

The tools available to edit these levels give no preview of the resulting order values, contain no information on sell through rates and finally no indication on the impact on your overall stock holding. This makes setting up min/max levels to manage your inventory time consuming and error prone. The Purchase Order Planner provides a number of pieces of vital information in one form. Finally the RMS Purchase Order Planner allows you to edit your restock levels (max) and reorder points (min) and see the impact this make to your overall projected stock values.

Grouping and Filtering

The Purchase Order Planner supports dynamic grouping and filtering of information. This allows you to slice and dice your data as you see fit. For example you group the data by Supplier and then Department and Category. Alternatively, you can group by Department then Supplier. This allows you see the impact your decisions are having on your projected stock holdings, and you can change this around as you’re working.

You can also filter data by any of the columns on the ‘reorder manager’ for example you may want to focus in on a specific supplier, where items are out of stock, and have been selling when so you can specify min’s and max’s to ensure the SKU’s remain available on the shelves.

Summary Information

Whenever you group information the RMS purchase order planner it will provide summaries on the following:

• Estimated Order Value – When you next run “Create New Purchase Orders” based on re-order information it shows you the value of the orders applicable to this grouping. i.e. the total value of orders raised for the ‘Clothing’ department, you could then group by supplier which would break this total down by the purchase orders which are to be raised to each individual supplier
• Current Stock Value – The value of your stock in this grouping at cost
• Projected Stock Value – The value of stock for this grouping after all currently open purchase orders and estimated purchase orders have been receipted
• Projected Min Value – Your stock holding if all items in this grouping are at their minimum (restock point) levels
• Projected Max Stock Value - Your stock holding if all items in this grouping are at their maximum (restock point) levels

Line Level Information

Detailed line level information required to make reorder decisions:

• Last Received – The last time the item was checked in via your goods in team on a purchase order
• Last Sold – The last time the item was purchased at the point of sale
• Qty Sold 30 – The sales of this SKU over the last 30 days
• Qty Sold 90 – The sales of this SKU over the last 90 days
• Qty Sold 365 – The sales of this SKU over the 365 days
• Stock Value – The current value of your stock holding of this SKU. For example, if you have 10 ‘RED SHOES’ each valued at £10.00 on within RMS stock file, this would show £100.00
• Supplier Cost – The cost your supplier charges for this item. This would typically be the last price you placed on a purchase order for this item. For example the shoe below was purchased for £1:

• Order Value Est – When you run the “Create New Purchase Orders” based on re-order information, this is the value of stock which will be ordered for this line
• Projected Stock Value – The sum of your current stock holding of this line, plus the Order Value Est. i.e. the value of stock you will hold once the purchase order has been raised and receipted. This figure includes the value of stock for this line on any other open purchase orders
• Qty Avail – The quantity of the SKU you have free to sell in your stock file at the current point in time
• OnOrder – The quantity of the SKU already on order on other purchase orders
• EstOrderQty – The number of items of this SKU which will be ordered next time you run the “Create New Purchase Orders” routine based on re-order information
• Reorder Point – The RMS reorder point, this field can be edited in the reorder Manager form
• Restock Level – The RMS restock level, this field can be edited in the reorder Manager form

Notes: The reorder manager excludes all:

• None Inventory Items
• Items marked as Inactive
• Items marked as ‘May not be placed on purchase order’

The reorder manager has full support for pack quantities (MPQ).

Supplier Integration - Images

We've expanded our ever growing Supplier Integration Module (SIM) to allow the retrieval of images from a suppliers B2B websites and drag these into your POS system. The system supports images of different resolutions and is part of our new product preview feature.

Product Preview

A rather pretty large image preview

Viewing a web friendly product description retrieved from a suppliers B2B system, within your EPOS system

Enhanced Checkout Process

We've built an enhanced version of our checkout process, this is available to all customers on our latest 2.1 e-commerce platform with some styling from our design department. It's available at no additional cost to our Access All Area's customers, so if you want this feature, let James know so he can book this into your maintenance plan.

It removes a page from the process by combining the entry of delivery and billing addresses onto one screen. You can see this in action at the time of writing at The Climbers Shop.  Research would lead us to believe that this will result in an improvement to conversion rates.

Showing Stock on Inbound Purchase Orders

We've added an update to our e-commerce system, which allows you to show stock availability on your ecommerce store which is available in your supply chain on your purchase orders. This allows you either to show all stock both locally and ordered within your supply chain as a consolidated figure or more usefully show stock on purchase orders when local stock is not available. In this model its possible to show an available date for example:

1 available in 4-5 days

Its also possible only to show available stock close to the purchase orders 'due date'.

This allows you to take pre-orders for new season forward orders. This is both an invaluable for further leveraging your investment in stock, fulfilling demand when its hottest (when stock isn't available elsewhere) and perhaps most importantly of all to be the first to provide content on a particular 'subject' e.g. product name to Google.