January 2, 2007
Oscommerce Stock Control Problem
For the past three years I have invested many hours in managing my web site to the best of my ability and your continued assistance in maintaining and monitoring of my site rankings have been extremely appreciated. However, I have concluded that my approach simply is not coming to fruition despite noticing small improvements in the traffic, the orders, and the Google rankings. Yet the amount of business that I am generating is not what I would like it to be. Roughly, for every three orders that I get at least one cannot be filled because the item is out of stock or discontinued at the warehouse but is not reflected on my site because I didn’t check stock levels and update my site because I didn’t have time ( which is a recurring theme). Although the Excel population software that you helped develop and installed on my site has promise in facilitating some of the work, it does not dramatically improve the number of hours that I must invest to manually check inventory because the files that my distributor offers and the format that OsC uses are not compatible so that I can simply click and upload in a matter of minutes stock information, descriptions, and add or remove items (as opposed to spending many hours and days manually doing these tedious steps for over 2000 items).
What I am getting at is that as a courtesy to you for the many years of online friendship, I am letting you know that within the next two months I will be transferring my domain name to a new web site that has successfully synced stock information with the shopping cart software and my distributor’s stock details. This decision is being made for practical and financial reasons. Stock information will be synchronized automatically on a daily basis by the ISP, new and old items will be added and removed automatically, and thus reducing the number of sales that I can’t fill because my current site is inaccurate. I will terminate web hosting with Ipower and with it the expensive SSL fees that are imposed on me by Ipower. I will purchase an SSL certificate that is less expensive and will be able to use it with the new ISP.