Anyone running an e-commerce site?

[DCarroll]

Hi folks,

We are considering setting up an e-commerce site to sell some of the products that we currently have in our Tigerpaw Price Book. There are many integration issues with this and I wonder if anyone else is doing it - love to hear your stories.

Some of the issues I’m thinking about are: how to set MAP in the price level so that can be used on export to the site, setting up and maintaining custom fields for certain functions such as “store y/n”, “dimension H,W,D”, etc.

Thanks!

[techcierge]

Good Morning,

We have toyed with the idea of hooking to the price book with Magento or WooCommerce and have gotten some estimate on what a plugin would cost to commission. Our programming looked at both a direct connection with the database and going through the customer portal. Both present their own issues. As far as setting up a MAP from the test exports we did we changed the list price to MAP conforming but getting the proper info either from the tables or out of Crystal Reports isn't much of an issue. The custom fields for dimension and some sort of a tag for being marked for import or export would not be a problem either. Making sure that stock levels (On hand / Reserved / Available / On Order) accurately synch and that the checkout processes can be aligned was where we are still on paper with. The clients we want to sell to come 100% from referral partner(s) and are buying speciality POS systems for their business. We have experimented with setting each one up with portal access to approve quotes but when they go to our website a fair amount wants to know why they cannot pick out their packages and pay right there. If you want to use Tigerpaw accounting and PO's then you might want to start looking at an integration into the quote module itself to process everything.

Hopefully someone on here has a story for you. I have had experience with high end e-commerce (Hybris) to Magento / BigCommerce / OSCommerce / WooCommerce / and custom jobs that our developer wrote. Finding an ecosystem that plays nice with the other pieces you use and vendors is pretty important. If your vendors are the IT types that are already hooked into to Tigerpaw you could build out a decent solution.

A couple of questions... What platforms are you considering and how are you planning on dealing with pictures? I really like using GfK's Etilize for specs and pics and it seems like it could be customized to push to a few places. I haven't explored getting it into Tigerpaw (though that would be really nice!) but considering how important pictures are in most types of eCommerce I am curious.

[DCarroll]

Hi Clifton,

Thanks for your answer. We are an AV integrator so few to none of our manufacturers are integrated with Tigerpaw the way some are in the IT world. So we have a person who updates books regularly through the import wizard. Our ecommerce platform is Magento. We are just getting started so the issue is how to populate the products in Magento. Since we already have a process in place to maintain price books in Tigerpaw it makes sense to export Tigerpaw data to Magento whenever there is an update. The problem is that we need more data than Tigerpaw maintains. The quote wizard won't import into Price Book Custom Fields. Perhaps we need to write a better import tool.

90% of products are going to be convert to order and drop ship - we will not maintain inventory. So, an integration into the quote module would make sense. Each order from the store would turn into a quote and we can turn it into a PO. Presumably it will already be paid out of the store by the time we get it. Again since we are getting started I think we will do that manually using a special quote template and drop them in one at a time. If we start selling a lot of some items, then we will want to create automation for that.

Pictures and product links are very important, I agree. I just went to look at GFK Etilize - I will have to dig deeper to see if they handle our manufacturers. AV products are sometimes collected under IT but there are a lot of odds and ends that IT folks don't deal with. There is an AV industry group AV-iQ that consolidates product data and I have inquired if we could have access to their picture library. The manufacturers are generally no help.

[DCarroll]

Are you saying that you changed the list price in tigerpaw to MAP? So then you don't carry list price anymore?

David Carroll

[techcierge]

You are welcome. We too do A/V and want everything to be centralized and simplified. AV-iQ is nice let me know how that works out. Etilize does have A/V as well. The manufacturers we use have not been good at providing data but Scansource has offered up a database that includes pictures and details. I am trying to get them to make the connections to Tigerpaw. We own D-tools 5.5 but haven't upgraded to 6 or kept content current because again I want to push everything through one place (Tigerpaw). Mage is a solid platform. Since you are not actually maintaining inventory levels and don't have to worry about it from multiple places have you considering adding your Tigerpaw inventory FROM Mage exports? A similar export could be created after each sale to move to the quotes side for fulfillment.

*As for the list price change this was just in testing... You could use another field for this. It would make sense to in the scenario I described above.

[DCarroll]

Hey Clifton,
Great to find another AV house on Tigerpaw! Maybe we should form an AV special interest group?

Stupid question... "Mage" short for "Magento"?
So what you are saying is to the price book import into Magento, then export it back to Tigerpaw rather than the other way around? Interesting. We do track inventory levels, but just don't stock most AV equipment items. So I don't want to rule out the possibility of syncing inventory levels with Magento.

Using another field for MAP... you are referring to Tigerpaw Custom Fields? Seems cumbersome?
David