Attention - All product selling businesses

Hi

I would like to know what product selling businesses think of stock control and how many use a form of stock control, either very basic (pen and paper) or something more advanced like a spreadsheet or paid for software.

Please post if you DON'T use stock control software, why not? Have you not found a need?

If you DO use a stock control system why? what are the benifits and what type of system do you use?

 

[kyber]

My brother runs a specialist book selling outfit (covering books and other publications on Mining, Industrial archaeology and Caving (see http://www.moorebooks.co.uk).

Despite having a stock often in the thousands he does no stock management beyond the list of books he maintains unstructured on a number of simple web pages (the site referenced above). When he sells a book (or perhaps I should say all copies of the same title which he recognises when he can not find any more copies) he simply deletes the text from the appropriate web page.

He can use a spreadsheet but really can not face building anything in Access. He really needs something that makes it very easy to maintain stock details and which can be incorporated with easy into a transactional website. He was provided with an Access database a while back used by another book outfit but lacked the skills to be able to change this to meet his needs.

He would be the first to admit that he is not technically literate so anything he might used has to be very simply to use. His business is modest as well as a sideline to his day job any only turns over say ten to twenty thousand per year. It does have the potential to grow though. He has not convinced himself that he can (should) afford to use a stock control package or have a dynamic website built. (I have the technical skills but not the time to set him up.)

Stuart

 

Dear Stuart,

After reviewing you brother's situation it would appear he has to through allot of maintenance just to keep on top of everything, with my proposal below this would be reduced dramatically allowing for more time to be spent on other areas of the business for example.

View http://www.stock-control.com/intergration.jsp I believe this system would be perfect for a system such as your brothers.

Firstly he would have to sign-up for a stock-control account, he could then send me a access file with all his current products which I would then upload to the server for him to avoid un-necessary lengthy inputting time.

We would then talk to your brother regarding the website integration offered in the above url. From there he could update all the product information via the stock-control system, this would remove any need to edit web pages.

Hope this helps mate, contact me at [email protected] if you would like to discuss in more detail and of the above.

Regards

Andy

 

Any more??

 

[Steve]

..... your brothers `Home` link isn`t working.

 

It's working for me but...

There's no "Add to Cart" buttons!

And it took quite a while for me to discover "How to Order". It's well hidden.

Really, he could easily add something like Mal's Ecommerce FREE shopping cart facility which will put credit card details on a secure server and let people place orders really easily. This is the answer if he wants to spend no money (just time).

http://www.mals-e.com/

But this method doesn't solve the problem that he already has. When a book is sold he has the tedious task of deleting all the details and "buy now" code from the web page. Likewise in reverse whenever he adds a book.

And even when something is removed, the details will remain on servers around the world for days or even weeks, due to "caching" and propagation delays.

This can be combated by using a database system instead, which is much easier to update (but I'd avoid Microsoft Access for it).

However, I'm not sure if details in a database are visible to search engines. This could be more of a drawback than having deleted details remain in the search engine listings!

I'm only an amateur, by the way, and Andy might well be offering the best solution if your brother can justify the cost.