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Location: Stroud, Glos, United Kingdom

Monday, June 05, 2006

An e-directory update...

About a month ago, I got my main shopping website listed with e-directory. I know there were a couple of comments at the time asking for updates as to how it was going.

Well, its all in place and bar a few teething problems, there are orders coming in.

The teething problems are mainly concerning keeping their product list up to date with mine - this is going to be sorted in the next couple of days, as soon as I get around to producing a daily feed that they can access to keep their product list in line with mine. Not being up to date has caused a few problems with customers expecting goods overnight when we have either had to get the items sent direct from suppliers or wait on new stock coming in.

We are getting regular orders, which have added up to about 4% of our sales this last month. Not exactly earth shattering and considering the agro involved - really not worth the effort. Still, its very early and given the fact its the quietest time of the year for us, I really want to withold judgment. Will there be any profit involved over a 12 month period? Well, yes definately for them! For me..... I think so but the factor that needs weighing up is how much extra work will be involved. If I can iron out the problems and get it running smoothly then I have the staff in place to do the packing and other than paying their wages and paying the commission to e-directory, there could be a little left over at the end of the year.

One thing I could do with is some new software for processing the orders. As it stands, we are using their order interface but this is pretty slow and time consuming. They do have a direct link to download all new orders in txt or html format, ready to be integrated into order processing software but at present I am not using any!! I find that with the contributions I have in place, osCommerce is more than capable of handling large order quantities taken through our website so I dont use any other software. However, although I could probably import the e-directory orders into the osC database, I would prefer to keep them seperate. Any suggestions as to a very basic order processing software package?

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