Coming soon: smart new “catalogue” product status feature
We’re excited to unveil a feature so new it’s not actually live yet! It’s still in testing and is due to roll out with system updates in the autumn, but we wanted to give you a heads up as we think it’s pretty great. (If we do say so ourselves)
Introducing a new product status
As a merchant, your product file is crucial. Keeping up to date with what products you sell is one thing – keeping up to date with what products you might sell, or have ever sold, is another thing entirely.
We are introducing a new product status to help merchants manage their product portfolio more quickly and easily, both operationally and administratively.
“Live” products are the items and materials you actively buy, stock and trade. “Catalogue” products are those which you may have sold in the past but which haven’t been actively traded for a certain period of time (and yes, you get to specify what the period of time is, to suit you)
This means that day-to-day, you’re sorting through a smaller, more easily managed product list, speeding things up and simplifying everyday tasks. But you have the scope to broaden that list out to search all the products you might trade, or have traded in the past, all without cluttering up your everyday operations and searches. Effectively it’s an archiving system, but one which saves time and effort on a daily basis and – crucially – doesn’t need manual administration.
Intelligent categorisation and system management
The system will automatically be able to assign products as live or catalogue depending on how recently that product has been actively bought, stocked or traded in your business.
So, the products in your yard or warehouse, the ones being bought and sold regularly, the ones you most commonly trade, are all identified as live products.
You can set the parameters to say at what point a product will drop into catalogue. It might be 3 months, or a year, that’s up to you. But once you’ve set it up, the system manages it for you so you don’t have to worry about it. The product is still there, able to be accessed at any time, and once it is bought, stocked or sold again, it’s automatically back on the active, live list.
Saving time and effort without compromising range
If you have a product file of 20K products but only actively trade 5K of them, logically speaking it’s going to take you a lot longer to sort through those additional 15K lines when you don’t need to.
Thanks to Merchanter’s intelligent product status categorisation, it will automatically show you the products which are, day-to-day, the most relevant, thereby saving you time and effort. The rest of the product portfolio is still right there, and if it does become active, it will go straight back into the “live” list without you needing to do anything.
It’s a clever little change which we hope will be a big benefit to our customers. We’d love to know what you think of it once it’s rolled out later in the year, so please do let us know!