CitrusStore 2.0

Integrating Stock Availability into Better Search

2012-05-11T07:58:53Z

We’ve been putting some RnD £’s into developing Better Search, as we continue to build this into the preferred search tool for our platform.

We now have the ability to show if a product is in or out of stock (this is multi location aware and hunts across all warehouses), you can also search for products which are in stock.

The stock hoverovers are loaded using AJAX, so they are super quick and don’t hold up the page loading whilst this information is calculated.

Hover Over Stock Lookup

Finding Active Products with No Stock

2012-05-10T18:06:20Z

We’ve added a helpful report which allows you to find products which are “all out of stock”, this supports local stock, items which are de-plenished across both local and warehouse locations (including SIM suppliers). Finally you can hunt for things which are active on your website, but where inventory is only available in a SIM warehouse.

Thanks to Edge and Wax for this idea, and funding the development work. Good efforts guys!

Ebay Round 3

2012-05-03T18:53:28Z

Good ‘Till Cancelled and Immediate Payment

We are working towards having support for ‘Good ‘till cancelled’ support and ‘Require immediate payment’

Bug Fix

The character counts on eBay product titles and sub titles now update more reliably. Thanks to Scott @ Edge and Wax for bringing this to our attention. Can’t believe it’s another seven months until I can get back on the snowboard .

eBay Improvements // Round 2

2012-05-01T21:58:03Z

We are popping Market Place tools into it’s own section in Merchant Tools so we can add more screens and keep things organised.

Nice Category Name

Category List retrieved from eBay every four hours

Added the ability to view eBay category list, and numbers reducing the need to X-reference to the eBay site. This screen also has search on both the eBay category ID and eBay category name.

Quick eBay Category Validation

Added eBay category validation, so you can check you’ve entered a valid eBay category ID in the CitrusStore category setup, avoiding nasty listing errors.

Amazon and Ebay // More Improvements

2012-05-01T08:23:46Z

Ebay Planner

We’ve added a screen which allows you to easily find products which do not have eBay categories and item specifics defined. Once an eBay category is defined,

Better Management of eBay Product Titles Maximum Lengths

The Ebay product setup page now includes the length of the longest matrix text (for example “Small”) when displaying the title length. This prevents Ebay titles becoming truncated.

Avoiding Accidental Deletion

We’ve setup CitrusStore so you cannot accidently edit or delete EBay and Amazon categories.

Display Glitch // Email Back in Stock Fixed

2012-04-16T10:23:31Z

We had a nasty habit of displaying extra rows of data related to email when back instock in the attributes grid. As illustrated by the pink rows in the first screenshot below.

This has now been sorted after build:

WAS:

NOW :

Review Followup Emails

2012-03-17T12:48:17Z

Just a quick link which demonstrates what happens when the customer clicks on the link in the review email. Click the link Carhartt Cargo Bermuda and you will ping straight into the reviews screen for this product.

Review Followups

2012-03-11T18:05:43Z

We’ve added a new module which allows CitrusStore to send emails requesting product reviews fourteen days* after a product is purchased. The purpose of this system is to drive customer back to your ecommerce site to review the product. We’ve been doing this manually for some customers for the last few months and it leads to a significant increase in the percentage of customers submitting product reviews.

Product reviews are trusted by purchasers, and also generate unique content, which is great boost for natural search results.

The module is available for a small upfront investment to style and deploy the system, and a nominal monthly support cost!

* This can be configured for your site.

SIM Purchase Order // New Features

2012-02-04T18:20:48Z

Kevin has spent a snowy Saturday adding new functionality to our purchase order module, and changing the language to more retailer friendly terms. For example, the Cover Planner no longer says “Keep N days stock”, in now says “Keep number of days cover in stock”

We’ve also added an exciting new option in “Cover Planner”.

Basing Cover and a Prior Calendar Period

You can now specify a date range of sales.

For example you can plan 30 days cover, based on the average sales in a period the previous year, rather than say looking at the last 90 days of sales.

These are available to SIM customers after 2.4.0.6.

Support for Ebay Item Specifics

2012-02-02T18:59:56Z

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

2012-01-19T12:57:15Z

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

2012-01-16T13:35:25Z

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

2012-01-09T19:01:48Z

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

2012-01-09T18:52:35Z

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

2012-01-08T16:41:11Z

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

2012-01-03T12:11:09Z

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

2011-12-20T11:19:31Z

From build :

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

The following issues have been resolved

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

Better Search

2011-12-18T18:49:13Z

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

2011-10-09T13:43:12Z

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

2011-09-20T07:43:07Z

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

2011-08-01T09:40:26Z

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

2011-07-15T10:25:43Z

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

2011-07-13T15:30:03Z

· 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

2011-07-03T18:29:00Z

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

2011-06-16T08:39:26Z

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.