Managing multiple cost prices, use-by/expiration dates per SKU

[emilioj]

Hi there!

I am new here so, first of all, greetings to all the thirtybees community and I hope you all are Ok these weird times...

I'm just evaluating thirtybees these days as the prospective platform for our small online shop: we've been using Opencart so far, but after some years we're now changing/renovating most of the stuff in the store (brands, packaging, etc.) and we're also thinking about improving the e-commerce solution we're using. I'm a computer scientist with little time to devote to it, and little knowledge about web technologies as well, as my expertise is in other fields. Anyway, I like to have control (and learn) of the technical part running the shop, so I usually assume all the infraestructure tasks related to our store (software stack,  deployment, etc.).

My first impression with thirtybees after a brand new installation is quite positive. A quick and easy installation process. Now I'm having a look at the back and front office. I'm also evaluating how easy (and expensive if I need to hire some help...) would be a potential migration from OC (not a lot of SKUs, but lots of orders/customers history after more than 6 years).

Being honest, I'm not really sure about the change/migration. Before doing it I really need to be sure It'll be a real improvement in the shop, at least in some aspects. Among the main reasons why I'm thinking in leaving Opencart are the chaotic development and opaque roadmap of the project, at least in my opinion. Since the marketing expert we've hired to help us with the shop renovation is mostly a Prestashop expert, I reached this project (thirtybees) that I didn't know so far. As a free software zealot I like community-driven projects, and I read bad things about Prestashop in that sense, so I decided to give thirtybee a try!

Sorry for the long introduction, I'll try to be more concise now about the current doubt I'am asking for in this message :-)

How do you, people in the thirtybees community, manage to have multiple cost prices (wholesale price in thirtybees backend) per SKU?

I mean, maybe I have 25 items I bought with price X, but now my provider has increased the price so I have items with different cost prices in the same SKU. Tracking these changes in a proper way is needed to help us to track real profit (and when doing tax-related bureaucracy)

A similar problem would be use-by/expiration dates: different items in the same SKU have different expiration dates. Looking for this here I found this unanswered question: 

How do you usually manage all these inventory management related issues in thirtybees.

We've being doing it manually so far, using spreedsheets, but we'd rather to improve our workflow now and automate some things.

I think we just need to include a sort of batches/sets list per SKU (I'm not familiar with inventory management terms in English, so sorry if these terms sound weird. I would say "lote" in Spanish), with specific information for each of then: provider, cost price, best-before, etc. With some more information (and tables) we could even have the whole provider orders workflow management.

How do you manage all this stuff? External software sharing database with your e-cart software (thirtybees in this case)?

Thanks in advance and sorry for being so verbose... O:)

Regards,

E

Edited April 6, 2020 by emilioj

[haylau]

Hi, and welcome

As far as migration is concerned, there is a module: https://store.thirtybees.com/shop-modules/administration/migrationpro-migrate-from-opencart-to-thirty-bees-migration-tool?search_query=migrate&results=23

The rest seems quite specific to your way of working, so no point in me saying how we do things. I can see we do stock and price control with the @datakick module and it is great.  Hopefuly someone will pop along soon with more guidance in those areas

[30knees]

Hi and welcome! As to best before dates, I'm using the module mentioned in the post you shared. @datakick cleaned it up for me and now it's working. It's not the most awesome tool but it gets the job done. 

@haylauWe also have the datakick module. Would you mind sharing (briefly) your workflow with it for this use case?

[haylau]

2 hours ago, 30knees said:

Hi and welcome! As to best before dates, I'm using the module mentioned in the post you shared. @datakick cleaned it up for me and now it's working. It's not the most awesome tool but it gets the job done. 

@haylauWe also have the datakick module. Would you mind sharing (briefly) your workflow with it for this use case?

We use datakick in a few different ways

• We have a microsoft access database with stock levels and prices. These are auto exported to disk. And auto uploaded via ftp to a server. This is done once per hour. The datakick module then grabs this file via a cron and imports the new prices and stock to thirtybees
• We use the endpoint export to export products for google feed and export orders for our courier
• We use crons to export for google sitemaps, and products / stocks for a thirdparty markeplace (onbuy)

A very usefuland very flexible module

[Traumflug]

The software stack part is pretty simple: a commodity LAMP stack is perfectly fine. LEMP (Nginx) as well, if one manages to replace the .htaccess files with Nginx's flavor of configuration.

[datakick]

18 hours ago, haylau said:

We use datakick in a few different ways

• We have a microsoft access database with stock levels and prices. These are auto exported to disk. And auto uploaded via ftp to a server. This is done once per hour. The datakick module then grabs this file via a cron and imports the new prices and stock to thirtybees
• We use the endpoint export to export products for google feed and export orders for our courier
• We use crons to export for google sitemaps, and products / stocks for a thirdparty markeplace (onbuy)

A very usefuland very flexible module

Thanks for the nice endorsement, I really appreciate it. My module is indeed very flexible, unfortunately that also make it intimidating to new users. 

[datakick]

On 4/6/2020 at 2:33 PM, emilioj said:

I mean, maybe I have 25 items I bought with price X, but now my provider has increased the price so I have items with different cost prices in the same SKU. Tracking these changes in a proper way is needed to help us to track real profit (and when doing tax-related bureaucracy)

Thirtybees contains ASM (Advanced Stock Management) -- this should allow you to track purchase price of different lots.

[emilioj]

22 hours ago, datakick said:

Thirtybees contains ASM (Advanced Stock Management) -- this should allow you to track purchase price of different lots.

I'll have a look at it! I was aware of this module but I had read really bad things about it here (in thirtybees forum or blog, I don't remember, regarding its migration from PS and having important bugs) and I had discarded without even evaluate it. Thank you for pointing me out!

[emilioj]

Hi!

After some weeks pausing this task due to a huge peak workload, I am resuming my Opencart -> Thirtybees migration idea today...

I'm going to evaluate the ASM approach, though I've read multiple comments here&there about being a quite buggy piece of software since the PS1.6 days; for example, in some messages from wakabayashi in this thread:

Since I've received good reviews in this thread about @datakick component to interact with external stuff, and in the same thread I'm referencing about ASM bugs there are also mentions to that datakick component, I suppose it can also be worth it to have a look to an external tool to manage inventory and that component to link it with TB.

@datakick, do you have any experience in dealing with inventory management software + TB? Thanks in advance!

[wakabayashi]

Oh don't blame me for my old comments ^^

In general ASM has it's potential, but quite a lot would have to be fixed or redesigned. But I am still using it on our store...

The problem is that, most merchants don't know, how it should be working and then they are not been able (or too lazy) report bugs... That's why this asm project never gets really forward in the core.