Warehouse Locations

Hi



I'd be interested to know if or how people are recording the location of items on shelves or in their warehouses? At the moment I have added a field under 'Features' called location where I put this info down for each product. Obviously less than ideal as the customers can see it. Ideally it would be a field on the admin 'Orders' area or in the emails that go to the 'Orders Department'. Any thoughts or ideas appreciated.



Cheers,



Toby

Make it hidden to hide it from the customers.

A bump for this very old topic. I'd love to hear how people work with warehouse locations in cs-cart. First thing that comes to mind to me is to add it after the product code, or in a "new" field that shows there.

Am also wondering, is anybody using barcode scanners for their product picking?

Hi Flow, we are looking into this in detail right now. I have a few options to consider;

1. Use a cloud based inventory app such as Trade Gecko or Unleashed and sync it to our CS Cart store

2. Use a stand alone app such as Inflow (might be named after you, ha!)

3. Get an Addon built for CS Cart that adds a barcode field for each sku in our database. The idea then being that you would scan a received product, it would call it up in CS Cart based on the barcode, and then you manually enter the qty.

The problems I see are as follows, with option 1, none of the Warehouse Management Software (WMS) systems currently support CS CS Cart. Trade Gecko for example, has integrations for Magento, Shopify and Big Commerce. i am looking into the cost and time involved to have a custom addon built to plug into their API. Other downside, is a permanent monthly cost. But it does also integrate to accounting apps like Quickbooks and Xero which would be handy.

With option 2, the Inflow standalone program, you have to manually import/export csv files to update your inventory. I can't think of a way to make this work. For example; if your store tracks inventory, and you make sales, do you then import the updated qtys into Inflow each day? That sounds fine, but what if you're using Inflow to scan in and receive your goods? It very quickly gets confusing as to which program should be what in a master/slave arrangement.

Option 3, sounds appealing, I'm just not sure if any CS Cart developers have experience with barcode scanning to implement into our store.

Oh, there is an app in the CS Cart Marketplace that supports integration to a WMS called Peoplevox. The app is $750 USD though, and I've spoken to Peoplevox, their starting prices are £360 a month.

Flow, I've added some thoughts and a request for a barcode scanning Addon here; http://forum.cs-cart.com/topic/43767-any-developers-familiar-with-barcodes/ I'd be interested to see if you have anything to add, or perhaps thoughts on another way of achieving this?

Cheers,

Scott.

Hi Scott, great that you are looking into this as well. It does not have my full priority yet as i'm finishing a lot of other things right now, but I have started to look into it.

For me, I would love to keep things on our own server. My experience with some cloud services are good, but in general I feel that they are mostly overpriced, plus that you add risk - their server can go offline, or they could simply stop their service.

Basically, cs-carts inventory system is still OK for me. The only thing I would sort of like is having a system in place that tells our team where a product is (we could do this with simple codes I guess), and more difficult, a system that checks if they pick the correct product - this is where barcodes would come in.

Have you already seen http://www.orderhive.com/?

Hi Flow, in my month of researching and looking for an inventory app, I never came across Orderhive. It looks promising. I've paid for one month and I'm trialling the integration with my test store.

I'll let you know how it goes, thanks for the headsup.

Cheers,

Scott.

Great! I would have loved to do it but simply don't have the time yet. I need to finish some other stuff first. I'd be very curious to hear what you think about it :)

Re-bumping this thread.

Scott, how did you make out with Order Hive? I'm planning on testing it out as a trial run but I'd love to hear your input if you'd care to share.

Hello Everyone!

You can also check out Warehouse Management System add-on for a simple and easy Warehouse Management feature for your CS-Cart Store.

Regards,

Or you can use the suppliers module that gives you separate origins for shipping, separate email notifications for products ordered from each supplier as well as some other benefits.

I don't believe the Suppliers module works with MVE. But I'm not sure, and don't see why it would be needed for vendors. Are there that many vendors that have multiple warehouses that need to be specified?.

The suppliers module with a simple modification for Row/Bin locations will fit the needs of the vast majority of merchants who have separate locations for fulfillment and/or want to be specific for pickers in warehouse operations.

Since this topic has kind of gone from row/bin locations to whole warehouse operations, the answer to the OP is that a pretty simple modification can be done to add row and bin columns to the product table and enable those to be managed via admin and displayed only on the admin versions of the invoices.

Hi Michael, I trialled Orderhive a while back and had a number of issues in trying to connect our store properly. The tech support was very good and they did their best to help, but ultimately I was unhappy with the integration and dumped it.

I paid for an add-on to our store that lets us record a barcode against every product/sku. When my staff process an order, they scan each product they are picking and it checks and ticks it against the order. One all items are scanned, the order auto-updates to 'Sent' We also integrated with our local shipping companies here and have the order data lodged with them and a shipping label is printed. it all took some time and money to get set up, but now its done the order picking mistakes are gone and the productivity is much better.

Thanks, Scott.

Re-bumping this thread.

Scott, how did you make out with Order Hive? I'm planning on testing it out as a trial run but I'd love to hear your input if you'd care to share.

Thanks Scott,

Yeah, I'm having the same trouble in getting connected. They're doing their best but so far, no luck. The say the my server does not have "mod_rewrite" enabled, but my server tech insists it is. sigh.

cs-cart will not run if mod_rewrite is not enabled (or at least there will be no SEO name translation).