Retail Solutions User Manual

Your website is integrated with the Retail Solutions ePos which means that you can publish products to your website, manage these products via Retail Solutions and also download web orders from your website to your ePos.

The following User Manual describes how to manage the products on your website using the Retail Solutions ePos.  

How to Web Enable a Product

To web enable a product, check Publish to Web and provided that Allow Sale is also checked, the product will export to the website within 30 minutes.

What product fields are web integrated

The following product fields are integrated with the website:

• Title - see detail below on longer product titles.
• Price
• Promotion Price (taken from Retail Solutions 'Simple Promotions' functionality)
• Rating
  • Products are sorted with the highest rating products displayed first.
  • Products are automatically graded in the Retail Solutions from 1-20, with 1 being the worst selling product and 20 being the best selling product.
  • It is possible to manually override the automation using custom fields to assign a rating. 
• Best Seller, all products with a rating of 16 or above are automatically marked as Best Sellers. It is possible to update the value to something other than 16 or turn off this functionality.     
• Discounts Disallowed - if you would like to exclude this product from any promotions, un-check Allow Discounts
• Weight
• Supplier Code

Longer Product Titles

If you have product titles that are longer than the max character limit (normally 40 characters), you can enter the longer title in a separate field in the epos.  This field is found under the Other tab, click on the Product Information button on the sidebar, and then enter the longer product title under Product Notes.  This is optional as if it is left blank, it will use the normal product title.

Automated Stock Control

All stock changes are automatically synced with the website every 15 minutes - including any in-store stock changes.  A full stock file is sent at approx 3:00 am each morning in case any product quantities accidentally go out of sync.

The following settings are available for each product:

• Enable Stock Control - this enables stock control for a product
• Lead Time when Out of Stock - this is the number of days it takes to get a product back in stock. If you do not wish to show products as Out of Stock set the value for greater then 0 and the product will then display that the product is 'In stock - Allow X days for Delivery' 
• Out of Stock Quantity - This defaults to 0, but can be set this to a different value site-wide
• Low Stock Quantity - Displaying a "Low Stock" status is turned off by default, but can be set to a value site-wide for all products

Assigning Products to their Website Categories

Before products are web enabled, the website menu/categorisation must be set up.

The External Code field is used by abcommerce to match the product to its appropriate website category. The corresponding field on Retail Solution is the 'Sub-Department' code. 

You can see an example of the sub-department code (highlighed in yelllow in the image below).  You can click the question mark beside this field to bring up a search box to find the sub department.

In order for the product to appear in the right category on the website, the External Code for each bottom level category needs to be set to match the Sub-Department code exactly.  (Edit the category on the website in CATALOGUE - CATEGORIES & NAVIGATION)

Similarly for each Brand, the External Code for each Brand must match the Brand Code in Retail Solutions. 

Automating Related Products

When viewing a product on the website, other products that the user may like to purchase will also be displayed. The related products are automated using the Best Sellers algorithm and the top 5 selling products that were purchased with this product. 

Automated Web Orders Download

Every 15 minutes, the latest web orders are downloaded into the ePos system. 

Retail Solutions will check the NEW ORDER status for orders. Once they have downloaded an order they will update the order status of that order on the website to ORDER DOWNLOADED status.  Make sure that you never manually move an order out of NEW ORDER status (always wait until Retail Solutions do this).  If you move an order out of NEW ORDER STATUS manually the order will not be recorded on your epos system and stock will not be adjusted for that order.