Products
Your Product Business Requirements
- What applications would you like to integrate for products? EX: Counterpoint, Magento, BigCommerce
- What version of those applications are you using?
- Do you have any customizations to those applications?
- If so, what are they?
- Have you identified the minimum requirements to move the product data in each desired direction? Examples below.
- Website code
- SKU – Must be unique
- Name – Must be unique
- Attribute set
- Default price (not customer specific)
- Product type (Simple, configurable, grouped)
- Product visibility
- Description
- Short Description
- Primary image
- Additional images
- Product categories
- Inventory / Stock level (not location specific)
- Status
- Weight
- MSRP
- Sale Price
- UPC
- Brand/Manufacturer
- Additional item attributes (read-only)
- Product Name (must be unique)
- Type
- Weight
- Categories
- Price
- SKU (must be unique)
- Description
- UPC
- Sale Price
- Inventory Tracking Method (Normal, Variant, or None)
- IsVisible
- Inventory Level (not location specific)
- Additional item attributes (read only)
- Product Options (Grid Dimensions)
- Product Option Type (Drop down, color swatch, rectangles)
- Product Option Values (All grid options, +color codes if swatch)
- Variant Options (Grid cell values per variant – individual)
- Tax class (or Avalara tax code)
- Brand
- Search keywords
- Does your source data meet the product requirements for each application?
- Are the requirements “enforced” at time of manual or automated entry, or are violations allowed?
- If violations are allowed, what mechanism will exist to prevent “dirty” records from transferring to iPaaS?
- If you do not currently meet these requirements, how will these requirements be met? Will the required fields and data be added to the source data or should iPaaS.com populate this information?
- For example, would you like a default weight in the event that no weight is entered? EX: 1 LB
- If the information is going to be added, have the responsible parties and timelines been identified?
- If a default value is going to be used instead, will it need to be dynamic or will it always be the same value?
- Does your staff have a defined process to create new products with all of the required/common/additional data points for the source data? Do they have a process to verify or update the results on the website after upload?
- Where do you create new products? How do you create new products – what is the process? What detail is required?
- What product requirements does your business have for a product to move from Counterpoint to your website?
- When a customer locates a product for purchase on your web site, what will they see? Has a wireframe or UI/UX pin been generated by your web developer for products and/or categories on the site?
- What field will generate the name of the product on the web?
- Are there any additional product fields that will describe your product? EX: short/long description, HTML description, meta data, SEO data, ingredients, definitions, product condition, warranty, brand, type, height, width, depth, weight, notes etc
- Are there any product fields that should be set to ‘not visible’ that would be used for admin only purposes or set to ‘not visible’ upon initial product creation?
- Do you have any products that have options (different systems may call them attributes, variants, gridded items)? EX: color, size, alternate unit types etc
- If so, what are those options?
- How should a customer see those options on the site? EX: color swatch, drop down, etc
- Do you use barcodes? If so, what requirements do you have surrounding barcodes? Do you have multiple barcodes per barcode type?
- What field is used for price? Do you have multiple levels of price such as regular price, MSRP, sale price, etc? Where are each located?
- Do you maintain tax classes or rules within your source application that you would like to have iPaaS.com handle?
- Do you plan on making any changes to your product set for the site launch?
- Do you have any custom product data that should be migrated from a different location to your primary source application for this project?
- Is there any product data that would meet all of the requirements to be pushed up to the website that you would NOT want to go to the website?
- EX: You have a t-shirt that comes in black, red, green. You do NOT want the green t-shirt option to go up to the website.
- Do you have any product data that will be managed outside of the integration? You may have product data you wish to manage manually in an application such as product image or category assignment management within a specific application directly.
- How will you categorize or segment products on the website? Do you have an ecommerce category tree created?
- If you already have something in place, do you plan to re-design this for the site launch?
- Do you have any special categories? EX: new, sale
- Do you offer any special products that don’t follow a standard format? EX: oversized, special order, free shipping, fixed shipping, etc
- Do you have any conditional business logic that should override any standard product settings?
- How is the price of a product determined?
- Does your product ever change prices? If so, how is that determined and managed? EX: Sale price, special price, discontinued etc
- Do you have any products that require an additional fee to be associated besides general order details like shipping, handling and tax? EX: CRV, bottle tax, embroidery for clothing, etc
- Do you offer promotions? What are they? What requirements do you have for a promotion to be created?
- Do you currently or plan to integrate with any marketplaces where customers can purchase your product/service offering somewhere besides your website? EX: FB, Instagram, Google, Amazon, Walmart, eBay etc
- If so, which ones?
- What product/order requirements do these have?
- If so, which ones?
- Do you utilize substitute or related products?
- How should a product be handled when out of stock?
- How do you maintain products that are/will be available for purchase?
- How do you remove products from the site?
- What actions should occur if part or all of an item is deleted from the source system?
- For example; deleting a grid cell
- Deleting an inventory location
- Deleting an entire item
- Removing an Ecommerce category
- What actions should occur if part or all of an item is deleted from a destination system?
- How should dependent records be handled when a delete occurs? For example;
- If an inventory location is deleted, should all item inventory records for that location also be deleted?
- Are those actions current iPaaS features or is additional development necessary?
- Has a plan been developed for exceptions where this process cannot be automated?
- What actions should occur if part or all of an item is deleted from the source system?
Your Inventory Business Requirements
- What processes do you follow to manage your inventory? Do you utilize any non-inventoried or virtual products? Do you have the ability to consistently stock any products that could be listed as ‘always in stock?’
- Do you have any inventory best practices you follow? EX: safety stock
- Where does your inventory come from? EX: store(s)/location(s)/warehouse(s)? Do you require individual inventory levels for locations, an aggregate inventory level or a single location inventory?
- Do you require location specific inventory for the website?
- If so, does your website platform support location specific inventory?
- Do you intend to have the setup / configuration of location information on the website platform maintained by iPaaS.com?
- If so, is this a current feature of iPaaS.com or is additional development necessary?