Support for Ebay Item Specifics

We’ve added support for item specifics to our Ebay module. Once a product has been added to an Ebay category the ability to setup item specifics will be available in the Management Interface.

Define an Ebay Category:

We can now set item specifics on the product:

Find Inactive Items Quick and Easy

We’ve added a custom report to CitrusStore which helps identify inventory on-hand, which is NOT active online for purchase. It allows you to browse local inventory, also SIM and other RMS/warehouses. Therefore really useful for inputting new products on your site. To find it on the latest version of Merchant tools, just look for the ‘Find Inactive Products’ tab under the Product Management category on the navigation bar:

This opens up a page report showing the inactive items, which you can click on to jump to the product page on your Merchant Tools:

Enhancing RMS with Extra Reports

In this Blog post we wanted to make you aware of the growing list of reports Citrus Lime provide to enhance RMS. Below are 7 you can find ready and waiting in RMS. Reports which we have found really useful and believe you will too, here is how to find them:

The reports are located in two places within RMS Manager, SIM reports and extra memorised RMS reports.

Firstly, the SIM reports

If you go to Utilities on the RMS Manager toolbar and then select RMS Reports from the drop down menu you will open a window showing three tabs to the currently available SIM reports.

Each of these tabs open a report as described below:

Citrus Lime RMS reports – sales

This report shows sales by department. The start and end dates of the sale period for the report can be altered to your needs via the refresh on the top line. Each department can be expanded to show the sales for given dates within the time period and then again down to individual items.

This report is a really clear tool to allow you to see what is selling and when.

Citrus Lime RMS reports – tender

This report shows the tender values over the time period of the report. This can again be set to a start and end date of your choice. Each closing date can then further be expanded to show individual registers and individual batches on each register.

A really useful report for getting a visual of sales for each day across your store.

Citrus Lime RMS reports – VAT Analysis

This report shows sales per day broken down to excluding tax and tax due. Again, this can be further expanded by register and batch, and then also by VAT type.

A report designed to give clear assistance looking at VAT for your store.

Secondly, Memorized reports – SIM reports

These Reports have proved themselves to be truly useful and we wanted to share them. They have been memorised on the RMS report menu. They use the data provided by SIM and show it in handy ways. If you go to Reports on the RMS manager toolbar and then select Memorized from the drop down menu, you will open a list of memorised report. Scroll down this list and you will find four which begin with the prefix, SIM:

SIM – Aging Item List

This report will show you all the items you currently have in stock, but have not sold since a given date. Just change the dates in the report filter to suit those you need, for example you may use a ‘to’ date of 8 weeks ago.

This report is very useful for giving you a clear idea of what stock is gathering dust and maybe inefficient capital in your business – perhaps a start of a promotional sales list. The report could also be used to carry out a process of identifying items which are not selling and then beginning to work out why. These listing items can be investigated to see if their listing is correct on your site, or incorrectly entered on RMS, maybe marked as inactive or perhaps it may be the sale price has become uncompetitive.

SIM – Cyclescheme Voucher Usage Report

This report gives a list for the usage of Cyclescheme vouchers between two given dates. Just use the report filter (as shown in the image) and highlight the date in the filters box. Change the values to the from and to dates you require and click Add. Then select and remove the unwanted original dates and then click OK. You will then have a report to keep track of Cyclescheme voucher through your store.

SIM –Detailed Sales Report (With VAT Detail)

This report gives you an internal RMS Report showing detailed sales information for a fixed time period- including VAT data.

Useful to identify what products are selling, as well as to help with tax returns.

SIM – Items on Backorder at Supplier Report

This report provides a list of items which are on back order at your suppliers. This report is a quick and convenient way to see what items you have on purchase orders. It takes that a step further, allowing you to see which purchase order, whether it has been placed and you can even double click on the purchase order and go straight to the purchase order details.

This report is very useful for staying on top of your purchase orders- all items ordered from all your suppliers in one place. A good place to start chasing those items that have not yet turned up from the suppliers.

Refine by Leaf Category on Brand Landing Pages

We’ve had filtering by brand on our category results pages for some time. When you land on a brand they are leaf categories themselves on our brand landing pages. We’ve written some “magic” to find all the other categories the products on a brand lander appear in. We’ve then filtered this further to ensure we only list leaf categories.

The end result is speedy and efficient* method for your customers to break down the products in each brand you range by the type of product.

* Some serious SQL heavy lifting is required to do this, so we cache the results, only regenerating when the number entries in the ProductCategories table changes. Changing this from adding a stack of page load time, to being faster than a greased rat!

Speed and Logic Improvements to CSS Nav

Many (most) of our ecommerce systems are driven by variants of CSS navigation. We’ve implemented the ability to show the number of products in a category within CSS and this is highly tuned (cached) so CSS remains a fast way of generating navigation.

This can be implemented on any flyout navigation system, and most of our other navigation types. 

Better Search Version 2.0

We’ve made the following improvements to our “Better Search” BETA.

Searches Intelligently:

• A search for “Jackets” returns all “Jacket” products.
• Hunts multiple fields, for example “Blue Trainers” would return any “Blue” product in the “Trainers and Shoes” department, even the product does not have these keywords in the description.

Searches more “stuff”:

• Now searches the colour field, so you can search for “Red Jacket”
• New searches the code field allowing users to search for a product code

More Filters:

• Can filter by “sale items”
• Filter by the colour field

Sorting:

• Sort by Name, Name reversed
• Price High and Price Low
• By colour

Configurable:

• Filters can be switched on and off by designers, for example the Coal page has the control locked to the Coal brand. This can easily be used on brand landing pages, and to create filterable sale pages. In the example (found near the bottom of the page) the control is configured to be locked to the Coal brand, so the brand filter is hidden.
  
  

Extreme Performance:

• Fully AJAX with no page postback
• Nice jQuery driven fades to give the user proper feedback for slower searches
• Paging is also AJAX driven

Example Colour Sorting

Coupon Bug Fix

When applying a value (£) discount and applying this “Once Per Order” the discount would only be applied to the first line item on the order.

For example if you have a £10.00 discount, and two different items for £5.00, CitrusStore would only discount £5.00. Whilst this “does what it says on the tin” in the real world this is impractical and has caused confusion.

We’ve amended this logic to apply it across the line items on the order. This is available after build:

Bug Fixes and Patches

From build :

Build Date : 20 December 2011 // 11:16
Version : 6.6.4368.20800

The following issues have been resolved

1. The setup of custom products now forces the clearing of track inventory rather than relying on the user to set this;
2. We call SetParentCategories every twenty four hours to ensure that parent category selections are always set. Runs nicely Async to avoid performance lockups;
3. Fixed issue with blog engine which allows articles in the blogging system to be renamed.

Better Search

We’ve grafted away and created a greatly enhanced BETA search, this allows the stacking of search terms, allowing a customer to quickly filter products to find the item they are after. You can checkout the prototype here : http://www.workingclassheroes.co.uk/AdvancedSearch.aspx 

Key Features

1. Step by step filtering

2. High performance AJAX partial page refresh

3. Multi word search handling, separating phrases into keywords and multi matching keywords

4. Refine the search as many times as required, with automatic refresh

Step 1 – the user searches for “Jacket”

Step 2 – the user refines by brand

Step 3 – the user refines their search to include colour and only products in the Outerwear Department

Exciting New Fields CitrusStore

Primary Category

We’ve added some new fields in CitrusStore. The first is “Primary Category”, this is the category we will feed Google, and indeed the category we will use on our breadcrumbs control.

You should define this for all products. The drop down shows all leaf categories in your database, setting this ADDS the product to this category as well.

Ranges

We’ve added a field with  a nice dropdown, which allows you to group similar products together. This might be a range of bikes ALA, group of wheels or jackets which comes in different colours:

Getting Ecommerce Images and Descriptions from SIM

Historically we’ve brought these in using nasty database scripts, which makes updating information tricky and has proven unreliable for certain suppliers. We’ve popped a button into the management interface which allows data to be downloaded directly, which puts our customer in control of updates and the initial data population.

Customer Special Order Handling // SIM Purchase Order Manager

We’ve made some changes to make finding customer specials on purchase orders that little bit easier. I believe on this one that the screenshots speak for themselves, so without further ado…

SIM // Purchase Order Drilldown // Import and Receive @ POS

We’ve added the ability to drill down to lines on a PO to adjust items, and see who is expecting specific lines. This makes it easy to manage and contact customers awaiting special orders. Screenshots below.

Import @ POS

Normally you would import batches of products from a supplier using SIM, however if you want to adhoc receive inventory or import a specific product for a customer special order you can do this in the POS, which is pretty cool. You can :

Type a suppliers part code;

Scan the manufacturers barcode.

You can then import the product and set an opening inventory position, or create a special order. It will even show you if the part is instock @ the supplier.

Coupon Upgrades

· We’ve completed the upgrades which make it easier to see which products, categories or vendors a coupon is applied to.

· We’ve also cleaned up the user interface and fixed a few bugs displaying errors.

· We’ve added the ability to create a batch of coupons, this generates a sequence of coupons with the code and the batch number appended to the code. It creates them all with the same “Description” which means the reporting reports on a group of codes, rather than reporting hundreds of coupons.

- We’ve added the logging of coupon usage to CitrusStore. Bizarrely we didn’t record which coupons have been used by which customers, this is now resolved.

· There is basic reporting available in the Coupons Screen

A few screen shots…

Figure 1 - Date Selector and Batch Create

Figure 2 - What is a coupon applied to?

Stock Check Added to SIM Basket

When you are importing products into our system from suppliers you can specify the Reorder Level (Min) and Restock Point (Max), so you can create a purchase order the moment stock is imported. Andy the main man @ Biketreks pointed out that it would be useful to be able to see if a supplier had product at the point of import, rather than checking in the purchase orders screen. We’ve added a “Check Stock” button which checks availability across your current search screen.

Before “Check Stock”

After check stock

Icon Manager

We’ve written an upgrade to the Management Interface for Bliss Bikes which allows the user to easily associate icons with a product, selecting from a bank of icons. This allows our customer to create a library of icons and quickly associate them with product records when we they are being setup. This makes it easy to have a bank of icons next to each product to encourage customer purchases.

Silverlight Fast Category Upgrade

We’ve added a maximise button to our Silverlight Fast category editor, allowing customers with big screens to see more of the category name without hovering or zooming.

This was a request to help with long eBay and Amazon category names.

Stunning Supplier Import and Data Management Videos // Version 2.0 Beta

Hot from the development team, two videos. Links at the bottom.

The first demonstrates importing a product via SIM into RMS, and then shows the product on a customers website, Edge and Wax. The image and description have come from Madison’s B2B system. The customer has expanded the description to tailor the product information to fit in with other products on their website. The image including the zoom is unedited, straight from the suppliers system and rescaled on the fly by our ecommerce system. One image for thumbnail, standard product image and deepzoom.

The second demonstrates searching for and importing a batch of products. The user then works on these in a purchase order, live checking stock information, removing items which are out of stock at a supplier and updating MSRP’s and costs dynamically within the PO.

The user batches updates prices, costs and finally deactivates items in RMS which the supplier has stopped stocking. The deactivation only occurs if the item is not in stock in your system, otherwise the product is simply marked as ‘Do not place on purchase order’.

http://www.citrus-retail.com/video/SIM1-GiroImport.wmv

http://www.citrus-retail.com/video/SimDemo2-BasicSIMUsage.wmv

Back in Stock Notifications

We’ve tightened up our back in stock notifications in CitrusStore. When a product is out of stock, we’ve been able to collect a customers email address for some time, however the user experience for this was always quite poor. The development team and the designers (or geeks and painters) have given the feature a complete overhaul, and it now supports products which come in different sizes and colours, with a user interface which you don’t need to be rocket scientist to use!

You can see it below used on a set of shoes, sizes 41 and 42 are out of stock. When these become available in your inventory, the system will send the customer an email with a link to the product and text which lets them know the product is available. It will also include a nice picture of the product, nicely scaled with our Dynamic Image Resizer. 

Perhaps the coolest new feature: the system will hunt Supplier Integration Module (SIM) stock locations, so it will automatically email your customers when a product becomes available in your supply chain (assuming your supplier can provide us this information, the switched on ones normally can). How smart is that (if we do say so ourselves in a slightly, but not overly smug manner :-).

New Functionality in CitrusStore

We've been working with ski company Edge and Wax to integrate new functionality into CitrusStore.
Features include:
New fields in the management interface to allow more technical information to be stored. Including:

• Dedicated field for YouTube
• Size Chart
• Brand icon with each product
• Technical information field

We've added the ability to display a special message with specific types of product. For example if you sold Canoes, you might want to display a message which explains how you ship this class of product.

There is now an option to show size and colour options in a list rather than in a drop down. This allows for more information to be displayed and looks neater.

A revised breadcrumbs control.

You'll be able to see these new features when the new Edge and Wax site is completed, along with our first full "Smart Select" page to help customers select their new ski's.

CitrusLime Smart Select for CitrusStore

You can see a demonstration of the way we are developing our ecommerce navigation on the Fawkes Cycles Disc Pad Selector, this is currently a technical preview of filtered navigation system. The new code allows the user to select multiple categories and only the product which are in all selected categories appear in the search results. For example a user may select 'Down Jacket', 'Arc'Teryx' and then filter the results for products between £100 and £200. This provides a much more flexible method of finding technical products as demonstrated by the beta of the pad selector. Whilst initially this only works against a small number of products so we can complete testing and refine the system, logically this would be used across an entire site.

New Workshop Features

We’ve been beavering away working on version 3.0 of our RMS workshop and scheduling module. The new functionality includes:

1. Significantly improved performance;
2. A simplified more reliable front end in the RMS POS screens;
3. The ability to track when / if a bike has arrived in the workshop – a simple screen allows you track and contact customers who have not brought their bikes in;
4. Templates for workshop emails and SMS – allowing you to create standard templates to send updates on jobs to your customers;
5. Single click printing of workshop job sheets, avoiding the need to select a printer;
6. New report to analyse new bike build financials separately from other workshop jobs;
7. Ability to edit customer contact details from within the workshop job screen;
8. Cashier booking in job and time of booking in displayed on job

Collect @ Store

We added an upgrade to CitrusStore which allows the customer to select the option to collect their goods from one of your retail sites. The option:

Provides a Collect @ Store option in the checkout process;

A user is forced to enter a separate billing address to enforce credit card security checks;

When this is selected the customer sees the store address entered as the delivery address;

No shipping charges are applied to the order;

The order confirmation email clearly states that the order is for collection at store.

Currently this upgrade is limited to a single stock pickup location, but it could be expanded to allow selection from a number of sites with further development. Thanks to Warrington Wolves for commissioning this new feature.

Purchase Order Item Type Filtering

The Supplier Integration Module purchase order reviewer screen now comes with features to streamline and clarify the purchase order tracking process. As part of the purchase order review screen, you can now remove:

• Customer Order Items - Remove items from the purchase order which are for customer orders
• Stock Order Items - Remove items from the purchase order which are not required for customer orders
• Out of Stock Items - Remove items from the purchase order if they are out of stock at your supplier
• All Items - Remove all items on the purchase order

Stock Order Items

Given the purchase order:

Removing stock order items would remove the items which aren’t committed in the system, leaving only the items required for fulfilling customer orders on the purchase order:

Customer Order Items

Alternatively, taking the same purchase order above (2 lubes, 1 12 tooth and 1 11 tooth sprocket) and applying the remove customer order items would leave only the purchases for stock:

In both cases the Lube remains on the order, as we are ordering one for stock and one for a customer.

Out of Stock Items

The remove out of stock items feature checks for stock of the items with your supplier, and removes from the purchase order any items which are currently not in  stock. This prevents you from needing to keep partial orders open while you await delivery of any items which have been placed on back order.

In the purchase order screen, click Items and then the Remove Out of Stock Items option.

The system will then check the stock on each item, and delete it from the purchase order if there is no stock – no more partials (well, in theory, anyway!).

All Items

Pretty simple this one – it removes all of the items from the purchase order, and closes the purchase order viewer screen to allow you to cancel an order quickly if it hasn’t reached the free shipping threshold.

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.

You can checkout the PCS 9 Park Tools Workstand, on ebay here and Amazon here.

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.