After nearly leaving, we have decided to stick it out with and place a long-term bet on Steph, Ryan, and the dozens of new programmers who have been hired of late to restore MC's prominence. We actually developed a new feature-rich cart on another platform, but in the end we just could not get the same reliability that we have here.

This leaves us looking for a work around to the lack of features that almost drove us away. In a nutshell, the wholesale side of our business has grown dramatically and will continue to be what drives future profits and growth for us. In fact, we are starting to do custom manufacturing and will be offering cut rate prices to “super wholesale” customers ($5000 orders or above).

This is the problem: We cannot offer different minimum purchase requirements by price levels. We also cannot turn off for wholesale customers the site wide discounts that we use to reward our larger retail customer purchases, which can be substantial. Nor can we have products that are available to Retail customers but not to Wholesale customers (and vice versa).

One possible solution is to use a program like StoneEdge, but we are not sure exactly what it can do. This is the idea:

Retail customers continue to use our online store, unchanged.

Wholesale customers place their orders via email form, phone, or fax. Those orders are processed through the StoneEdge POS system, with a different (lower) set of prices being charged. This would allow us to enforce our minimums and to sidestep the site wide pricing discounts we offer to our retail customers.

StoneEdge would then be used to manage a single inventory that drives both the store and the POS/Wholesale side of the business. However, the website and the wholesale side would each use just a subset of that inventory (not all products for all groups).

Is this something that StoneEdge (or perhaps a competing product) can do?

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EDIT

Okay, no response usually means I was not very clear, so here is a picture of what we would like to be able to do. My question is, is this what stonedge does?



Stoneedge keeps track of the inventory and tells the website and POS system how much we have of every item.

Retail customer orders from website. Order gets sent to Stonedge. Stonedge tells POS that we have fewer of each item because of this order.

Wholesale customers buy from the same inventory, with orders placed through POS. However, they can be given prices not up on the website. Since this is not being run through the website, minimum order requirements and site wide discounts are overridden.

Showroom customers (usually retail) can place orders though POS and get treated like a website customer.

Is this how it all works?

Robert-

I'm sure Barney will post here and give you a more detailed answer, but I can't see any reason StoneEdge wouldn't work for your situation. StoneEdge actually has two separate areas (POS and Manual Orders) - you would use the POS for walk in/showroom customers, and the Manual Orders for orders taken on the phone, received via fax, etc.

You can set default price levels for each of these areas, and also default price levels for each customer. This should give you the flexibility to properly charge all of your clients, whether they walk in, call, fax or place their orders online. It can also keep all of your inventory correct in all of those places.

StoneEdge is releasing a new beta of their POS software (next month?), but the current POS does work fine for low-volume retailers... also - you may consider having a separate cart (that is supported by StoneEdge) to allow your wholesale customers to place their orders online (either another store, or a store in a different shopping cart)... StoneEdge supports quite a few carts, so you may be able to find another cart that would work better for your wholesale customers (and would save you from having to manually enter the orders that you receive via email, fax, phone.)

Robert

I will leave it too for Barney to answer, but why not creating a separate site on the Platform for wholsale only? all what you will have to do in my opinion is to duplicate the site create a registration page and set the price level for each registered wholsale customer. (you can also create a wholsale area (user name and password required to log in on your regular site)

We are using Stone edge and I know for fact that it can import orders from multiple stores.

Nuriel

Thanks for your comments.

We actually tried to two-site approach briefly (without StoneEdge). Managing inventory was too difficult. Besides, we have a good name and developing a second brand name does not make much sense to us.

How would a manual entry work? Can we use the same product numbers we use in the site and then create a separate set of wholesale prices for those product codes in OM? I'm trying to visualize how it would work.

Yes - you can set up to 10 price levels in StoneEdge (which can manually be entered for each item, or you could easily use update queries, formulas in Excel, etc to automatically calculate the price levels). Then, you can either assign a customer to a specific price level (so they always get those prices), or an order type to a price level (manual orders = level 2, etc.)

I would suggest setting your wholesalers to a specific price level, and not the entire manual orders screen... this way, you can still take orders from your retail customers (via phone) and manually enter them with the correct prices. Any orders downloaded from your website(s) will automatically get the pricing that was listed on the web. You would not need to make new product numbers.

This is really useful info! Thanks.

Robert -

Sorry I missed your original post. We just returned from exhibiting at the Internet Retailer Conference in Chicago (our booth was just across the isle from the MonsterCommerce booth), and are about to leave for eBay Live in Las Vegas, and I have not had as much time as usual to monitor the Forum.

Anyway, Jared and Nuriel have done a great job of filling in for me (thanks, guys!). What you have described is a fairly typical situation Order Manager users. Using our POS system for walk-in customers, our Manual Orders screen for phone/fax/mail orders, and our various pricing and discount options should get you what you need, and our real-time inventory tracking will keep everything up-to-date. The program will also keep track of the source of each order for reporting purposes, etc.

If you have any other questions, I will try to answer them here, or you can give Stone Edge a call at 215-641-1837. They will be short-handed this week with three of us off to eBay Live. If you get voicemail, leave a message and someone will get back to you.

Thanks! Can the system work if there is a retail store in a location away from the server? Image a warehouse/wholesale showroom in city A, a site in cyberspace and a retail store in City B, each with its own pricing strategy (discounted prices on the web, wholesale prices in the showrrom, retail prices in the store). Provided that a product has the same product number, can these different locations and prices all be coordinated?

If the management of the Web store happens at the retail store site, you could make that work by treating the warehouse as a "fulfillment center" in the Order Manager. The Order Manager could send orders to the warehouse via email or text files, or using a small custom function. If you use drop shippers or other fulfillment companies for some of your products, the program would only send the appropriate information to each location, even if one order requires items to be shipped from multiple locations or drop shippers.

If the management of the Web store has to happen at the warehouse, we will not be able to handle that until late in the year, when our multiple POS location capabilities will be ready. That will also require the Enterprise Version of the Order Manager. To do it today you would have to run the warehouse/Web store separately from the POS location. The various pricing options are no problem, but you would not be able to have the two systems share the same inventory. Of course, that may not be a problem, since each would actually have its own physical inventory. That will still be the case with our multiple POS system, but it will also support a consolidated inventory for management purposes, inter-store transfers and queries, etc.