Getting Ready for the Holidays: Part 1

As the holidays approach we recommend reviewing some key settings on your IndieCommerce site to prepare for inevitable supply line issues and the ever changing holiday shopping schedule. You have several ways to adjust what stock shows, from simple things like disabling backorders to more advanced things like limiting stock to what is available in specific Ingram warehouses and limiting sales to your in-stock items..

Adjusting settings related to backorders and hard to find titles is handled in two places:

• Store Preferences - Store>>Configuration>>Account Information and Preferences>>Store Preferences 

  • This is where you select whether or not to allow customers to put hard to find, special order, or backorder titles in their carts, as well as set text for unavailable items.

• Configure Book Settings - Store>>Configuration>>Account Information and Preferences>>Configure Book Settings

  • This is where you will change text for product availability status for titles you do sell..

• You can also enable the Ask a Bookseller feature. If you do not see it, you can request it through your store features page, or email [email protected]

You can adjust which Ingram warehouses your site references as well. Select your warehouses, and either hide the others only from the admin order detail page or make them unavailable entirely. These settings are primarily useful to stores who make only occasional use of our “Send to Ingram” feature, since they can further reduce the number of qualifying orders

    •    LSI information will override these settings, so if you have a book on your shelves it will still appear whether or not you’ve limited your site to only your primary warehouses.

    •    Ingram data may not reflect publisher availability, and does not always match iPage exactly. There is the chance books will be marked unavailable but still be obtained directly from the publisher or even iPage.

You may also want to review your store pricing rules. These are found under Store>>Configuration>>Store Pricing>>Books

• Set markups and discounts based on the wholesale discount code. This is a great way to help adjust prices for short discount titles to offset the low margin, or run site-wide sales.

• Set markups/discounts for individual products by SKU.

• Mark specific items as “Not for Sale” by uploading a list of ISBN’s. You can also download your current list to add to it.

For that hectic week or two leading up to Christmas, some stores want to limit their site to only titles they have on hand. This can be set under Store>>Configuration>>Local Store Inventory>>LSI Settings

    •    Expand LSI For Books: Settings

    •    Scroll to the bottom of the page

    •    Select “Sell only books that are in stock in LSI”

    •    Save

This will remove the add to cart button for any item not listed in your LSI file.

If you are not yet uploading Local Store Inventory (LSI) data, now is a good time to evaluate whether to begin. Many POS systems have added an automation to streamline the process of adding store stock data to your site. This will reflect on your product pages, search results, and your order processing pages including the Pick List.