Linnworks and Stock Control/Inventory management

[Neil]

I didn't expect such a passionate response to my post! I think that John's remarks are valid whether or not he is Bluepark customer. In John's opinion "bluepark is a brilliant package" and I agree with him. I would suggest that John is airing his frustration simply because he can see that and easy way of integrating bluepark with other platforms would benefit both his company and bluepark equally.

I do suggest you read some of John's past posts, they weren't quite so flattering.

[john]

I am certainly not trying to gain any brownie points with Rich and don't like being called "a servile self-seeker who attempt to win favors by flattering influential people".... Thanks John!

I'm sure you know full well Dave that I was not referring to you in any way, if that's the impression you got then I apologise, you go out of your way to help people on here, the person I refer to is fully aware who they are.

[cupcakewrappers]

I've been doing some research and I've called a number of bluepark customers to get advice on the best system to use for stock control. The response is that it's tricky to get live stock updates in and out of bluepark and that an API would make the whole process a lot easier. Without the API it seems that people are building their own custom solutions to the problem and these solutions may involve using macros, spreadsheets, column mapping etc and are often over complicated for the average user.

So I'd like an API in the pipeline anyone else?

[Neil]

And you think an api is easy?

There are other threads regarding api's - add your name to them, they are quite long!

[Ashley]

First thing to establish is how many orders do you expect to get through BP and how critical is having the stock correct in BP. For us BP is not a stock management system so having accurate stock levels is not that critical. So we act as follows:

1. Order comes in on BP
2. We key that order to our offline accounting /order system which runs our stock
3. So we have one proper invoice for each BP order
4. We don't key the customer details into our accounting package we just use the BP invoice number as order reference. We can easily find the details on BP if we need them.
5. Every hour we FTP details from accounting package to BP, this updates the stock
5. We match up payment in SagePay admin panel to the accounting system.

The best advice I can give you, is don't use BP stock control if you don't need to. Just take orders regardless.

[cupcakewrappers]

And you think an api is easy?

There are other threads regarding api's - add your name to them, they are quite long!

HI Neil, Thanks for your reply. Yes i've read them all. I am certain that building an API must be quite difficult even with considerable technical abilities.

[dan1el]

First thing to establish is how many orders do you expect to get through BP and how critical is having the stock correct in BP. For us BP is not a stock management system so having accurate stock levels is not that critical. So we act as follows:

1. Order comes in on BP
2. We key that order to our offline accounting /order system which runs our stock
3. So we have one proper invoice for each BP order
4. We don't key the customer details into our accounting package we just use the BP invoice number as order reference. We can easily find the details on BP if we need them.
5. Every hour we FTP details from accounting package to BP, this updates the stock
5. We match up payment in SagePay admin panel to the accounting system.

The best advice I can give you, is don't use BP stock control if you don't need to. Just take orders regardless.

Sounds like a nice little system you have going there Ashley, Can I ask, what offline system do you use?

[cupcakewrappers]

First thing to establish is how many orders do you expect to get through BP and how critical is having the stock correct in BP. For us BP is not a stock management system so having accurate stock levels is not that critical. So we act as follows:

1. Order comes in on BP
2. We key that order to our offline accounting /order system which runs our stock
3. So we have one proper invoice for each BP order
4. We don't key the customer details into our accounting package we just use the BP invoice number as order reference. We can easily find the details on BP if we need them.
5. Every hour we FTP details from accounting package to BP, this updates the stock
5. We match up payment in SagePay admin panel to the accounting system.

The best advice I can give you, is don't use BP stock control if you don't need to. Just take orders regardless.

Thanks for your reply Ashley, we need to prevent back orders as we are keeping low stock of each item, so bluepark really needs to be on the ball with our stock quantities. We don't want to give the impression that the item is in stock when it may not be and let the customer down.