Categories: Tips and Tricks
Each month (February through November), we offer up a tip or trick to help you maximize the value of your WarehouseTWO membership. Here are the monthly tips for 2017.
February: Use MULTI-SEARCH to search for several versions of the same part number, at once. For example, if the part number includes dashes or spaces, search for versions with and without the dashes or spaces. MULTI-SEARCH allows you to search for up to twenty character strings in a single search.
March: Make your “How to Order” instructions more informative. Include minimum order value requirement (if you have one), shipping cut-off time (including time zone), and if you accept/prefer payment by credit card. Also, disclose any other fees that you might charge, such as inbound freight or processing fees. Refer to field #12 shown on pages 12 and 13 of our ACCOUNT MAINTENANCE tutorial PDF.
April: Create a unique user account for each of your active users of WarehouseTWO. “Shared” user accounts are less secure. Also, having individual user accounts gives administrators greater granularity of who is actively deploying “inventory-sharing” at your company. (Note: it is our standard practice to delete user accounts tied to email addresses that are “undeliverable” to, when sent an email.)
May: Clean up the phone number shown in your location record. Include dashes or spaces, if appropriate. Your company’s phone number(s) now can be displayed on the SEARCH screen. Your number is nearly illegible if you are displaying only digits, without dashes or spaces. For example, instead of entering 1234567890, enter 123-456-7890.
June: Do not compromise your price negotiation position with a potential seller at WarehouseTWO with communication like, “I desperately need this item that you have in stock!” Instead, consider a more veiled approach, such as, “While my customer can wait for factory lead time at a better price, might you be willing to part with this item at a reasonable price?”
July: In the SEND EMAIL TO SELLER template, the pre-loaded text, “(REPLACE THIS LINE OF TEXT WITH DETAILS ABOUT YOUR INQUIRY.)” means, “Replace this line of text with details about your inquiry.” ;-) In other words, add details as to why you are contacting the seller at WarehouseTWO. And then delete the text, “(REPLACE THIS LINE OF TEXT WITH A DETAILS ABOUT YOUR INQUIRY.)”
August: If your company has a transactional “e-commerce” website, use price to drive other WarehouseTWO members to enter their orders on-line. For example, make the prices that you display at WarehouseTWO “on-line only” prices, with “call-in” prices being anywhere from 5% to 10% higher. (Explain the difference in your account’s “How to Order” instructions. The result is reduction of workload for your customer service and order-entry people. Of course, you will have to set up pricing in your e-commerce system so that when another distributor logs in, WarehouseTWO pricing will be displayed and honored.
September: If you are offering your inventory to a world audience via WarehouseTWO’s WEB MARKET functionality, never let your postings expire. (Unless you have sold out of the posted item, of course.) That is, automate your data uploads to your WEB MARKET location. Allowing your postings to expire will reduce the likelihood that Google or Bing/Yahoo will re-index your items, diminishing the chance that your re-posted items will be found in Google or Bing/Yahoo searches.
October: The “Portal Access” box should NEVER be checked for individual user accounts. This feature is only for creating a shared user account to be accessed by any of your employees via a hyperlink available on your company’s intranet site or in your ERP system. For individual users looking for an easy way to revisit the WarehouseTWO website without having to log in each time, follow these steps:
Hence forth, clicking on the bookmark will instantly log you into the WarehouseTWO website. Never log out of a WarehouseTWO session. Instead, just close the browser window.
November: Use WarehouseTWO’s RELATED ITEMS functionality to automatically cross-reference between a manufacturer’s dual part numbering systems. Many manufacturers have dual part numbering systems: a model number known to end-customers and shown in the manufacturer’s product literature, and an unintuitive, “internal” manufacturing part number, often a sequence of digits. While it is best practice to post items to WarehouseTWO using the customer-facing model number, RELATED ITEMS will allow you to post your items using the internal part number and have those items appear in search results at WarehouseTWO when another member is searching by the model number. Click here to see an example of how this looks in a SEARCH result.
