Multi Retailer Product Management

This page outlines options for distributed retailers as shown here. It does not apply to multi store individual retailers using central management.

Creating Products

As a membership owner, any products you create can be deployed and loaded into your member stores. Create and maintain your products as normal, and changes will be deployed automatically to stores, generally within a few minutes. If a store cannot wait for automatic deployment, they can go into "Retail Memberships" and select "Download All" to request an immediate and complete download

• All products you create will be deployed by default
• If you only wish to send a subset of products, use the "National Product" flag, and tick which products are to be sent.
  The internal rule is if you have ever enabled/used the national product flag, it will be obeyed. Should you wish to ignore the national product flag, you enter the local db setting ProductDistributeObeyNationalProduct=0 (default is 1). When this is set to zero, your local system ignores national product flag
• If national flag is not being used, then all products are sent to remote stores.

Restricting Products to Certain Stores

The above outlines which products are sent to remote stores. Sometimes you wish to restrict products to a subset of stores, so that only certain stores load certain products. For example, some of your stores might be Stihl agents, so should load those products, but all other stores should not. To achieve this, we use Gateways which in turn use Formulas. These may be slightly strange the first time you use them, but are extremely powerful.

If we wish to create the product "Stihl Chainsaw" and restrict it to specific stores, then:

1. Create the product as normal with all normal details, description, price, etc
2. In the Field "Gateway Formula", put the value "stihl"
3. Save the product. Be careful to set gateway formula as the first thing you do, otherwise stores may download the product between edits

Now, only stores that have the setting "stihl" defined will load that product.

To enable a store for "stihl"

1. Login to that stores store controller. The setting must be set locally to the store, thats the whole point.
2. Go to settings, and edit ProductLoadRuleKeywords setting the value to "stihl"
3. The product will now load into the store, next time it is checked. Generally, you will want to "download all" products for the membership after you change this setting.

The setting ProductLoadRuleKeywords is a comma seperated of keywords. Keywords consist of letters A-Z, and 0-9 only, and they must start with a letter. eg "Bob123" is valid, but "123 bob" is not.

Advanced. The field "gateway formula" is exactly that, a formula. So while in the above we have only set one value at the Head office level, you can set multiple conditions, such as "stihl" and "ruralstore". See Formulas for more details on doing that

No Access

Sometimes stores may need to request new products are created in Head Office to be visible for all stores. This can be done manually, or automatically using Product Request Functionality