This is the next part in a short series of posts about the process of changing the core software I run my business on. Part 1 was about clearing down existing workload and the overview of the project.
As before, it's mainly so help me document for myself what I've done, but done on Hive because it might help anyone else who is thinking of doing something similar.
Image by REDQUASAR from Pixabay
Unexpected Updates
Any project has the potential to throw up surprises, and this one is no different. There have been two key updates in the last week.
First, the need to change the PayPal plugin on our website. We'd hoped to do it this week, but it needs our webmaster to be on hand and he's booked out until early next week. Although it looks relatively simple to do, the fact that the plugin documentation has a "troubleshooting" section immediately after telling us the webhooks will be generated automatically is a bit of a concern !
Second and more concerning is that 24 hours after our current software provider pulled some key functionality, we received an email from them advising of a significant price increase.
Something I never realised is that when an email is effectively an image (you know, the kind where an email client gives you an option to download images), it's actually an image hosted on the sender's server. If they change the image on the server, it changes the content of the email.
In this case, the first version said that the price increase was taking effect on our next billing due date (10 days away, with three of those days being a weekend and public holiday). This has now been changed to the next billing day after 30 days notice. That's still a very short timescale for a major software package we've been using for 10 years !
This increase and the way it's been handled confirms that my decision to move to an alternative provider is the right one.
Extracting Data
The next step in the process is to extract all the data I might need from the existing software, which I'll no longer have access to once the account is closed.
Some of it is a snapshot of current status, and some of it involves downloading all 10 years of history. Quite a bit of it is data I've already got scattered around various places, but it makes sense to have another copy with all of it in one folder (which can then be heavily backed-up !)
I've broken this down by operational category. Within each, the information consists of three types;
- Data that is needed as historic business records for compliance reasons (e.g in the event of a tax investigation).
- Data that is needed for the migration process.
- Data which may be needed for future reference, either for analysis or operationally.
The operational categories and reports in each are;
Orders
Reports generated were;
- Orders between dates - the key order history, all 10 years of it, with delivery addresses, dates, order values, shipping totals etc.
- Order details between dates - similar to the above, but with additional details of products in each order, postal services used etc.
- Copy invoices - saved as PDF's, primarily for tax records but also useful if a customer needs a copy
- Customer list
- Sales totals by source and subsource - a breakdown of data by sales channel, useful for analysis. "Source" is effectively each sale channel, and subsource kicks in for sub-channels, e.g. Amazon UK, Amazon France etc.
- Total orders by date and source - similar to the above, with a bit of alternate detail.
Channels
- Channel information by source - a summary of sales channel settings.
- Channel linking by source - this is the mapping of listings on each sales channel to specific product SKU's.
- Channel mapping by Category, Source & item - a similar report with a few extra details (e.g. the product category in each sales channel - every channel seems to have it's own category rules !)
- Ebay active inventory
- Ebay ended inventory
Inventory
- Composite items export - a breakdown of which items are included in each composite product (composite products are ones which are a set made up of several other products, e.g. a set of paints we put together from shared stock)
- Variation items export - variation items are products which are basically the same item, but available in a selection of colours or sizes.
- Product extended properties - this is a report of the data in all the extra product attribute fields. There are dozens of them, from country of manufacture to eBay category code.
- 90 day stock consumption rate report - shows how fast each product is selling, is needed to calculate how much stock of item to hold.
- Last sale date for each product - useful for identifying slow selling products.
We've got about 10,000 products in total. Good data management is the key to keeping on top of them all. I've got all the key product data in a separate spreadsheet, on the principle that if I've got it on my PC, I own the data, if it's only in some software provider's cloud system, they own it. But it won't hurt to download it all and compare the two sets of data !
A current stock levels report hasn't been downloaded yet, this will be one we have to do right at the point of switchover.
Suppliers
- List of suppliers
- Open purchase orders
- Part-delivered purchase orders.
Rules Engine
The rules engine is actually one of the better features in Linnworks, and one I hope to be able to replicate in the new software.
What it does is look at each order and decide if certain rules need to be applied which might modify how it's processed. For example, it may look at the shipping method the customer has selected in a sales channel, and decide that the value is too high for normal post so upgrade it to courier delivery.
Some of the rules are cunning and complex. Unfortunately, there's no way to download the rules as a report, so I have had to screenshot them. An example of a shipping rule (well, part of one) is below;
Screenshot by me
I've also got rules which look at postcodes to identify addresses where we've had problems of one kind or another, to give us a chance to manually intervene and decide how any new orders should be handled. One or two of the category names are strictly for internal consumption !
Downloading all this data was very much a full evening's work - I started at about 8pm, and finished at about 2am the next day. I'm still wondering if there's anything important I've forgotten !
Next time I'll go over the next step, of selecting an alternative provider.....