Managing Made to Order Options

Upkeeping product content is not a simple task

Any retailer will tell you that one of their biggest challenges is keeping their product catalogue current. Even ignoring the difficulty of synching data between siloed systems and the challenges many companies have with integrations, simply maintaining products is a labour intensive task.

That's partly because simply creating your product catalogue is only the start of the process. Suppliers can force price changes, update packaging, discontinue some products and add new ones; any retailer has to reflect these changes at their end as soon as possible. The nightmare scenario is to sell a product at the wrong price, or in a variation that no longer exists. 

This is challenging enough for bricks and mortar retailers, but once you factor in eCommerce and omnichannel, it's all to easy to find products that literally can't be sold without manual intervention. No business can afford to have unsaleable products.

Many companies employ people whose entire role is to manage these products and databases; they represent a significant investment in money, training and other resources. It's crucial that this investment isn't wasted.

Is your tech supporting your team?

Different industries need to handle products in different ways, which means that software that bills itself as a 'one fits all solution' might not actually be as capable as it claims to be. This is simply because the system that is built for single variant products won't be optimised for the more complex.

Lego sets are a good example. Each has a unique SKU, a unique barcode and a price. There are no options, and each product has a stock level; these single variant products are the simplest to set up and manage in any system. 

Most systems are also set up to sell fashion items. Shoes and shirts are a little more complex, because you have multiple variants within the same product. The options here are limited (typically size and/or colour), but each remains a stock item. Reporting and Purchase Ordering become a little more complex with these products, but they aren't too much more complicated than a single variant product.

Made to Order furniture is a whole different ball game.

To take a simple(!) example of a sofa with five 'fabric grades', twenty 'colours' in each grade, fifty 'scatter cushion' options and five 'feet options', you end up with a product that has 25,000 possible combinations. General eCommerce and Product Information Management (PIM) systems simply aren't set up to handle products with that many variations. 

IXO Commerce was designed with furniture in mind; that's why leading furniture retailers choose to work with us. Rather than working through individual products and option groups, we've automated option management so that it saves our retailers time, and eliminates the chance of human error.