Site updates using MYOB
Sat, Jul 16 2005
It's pretty common to have a list of products in a back-office system such as your accounting or enterprise management software so you can generate itemised invoices, or maybe even in something as simple as a spreadsheet so you can generate price lists or a catalogue easily. The problem is that to put all your products up on your website means duplicating all that information in a second location and then trying to keep them synchronised. If you add or update a product in your back-office system you have to remember to log into the administration area of your website, find the product, and make the same change there. That's a pain. A solution we've had great success with over the years is linking back-office systems including basic accounting packages to websites so they can automatically (or semi-automatically) update the content of the website on a regular basis. That means you don't have to care about making changes in two places: you just maintain your offline product information as you normally would, and when that changes your site is automatically updated to reflect the same change. One of the earliest systems we totally automated was for Earth To Air Technology way back in 1998, taking data from their product / stock control system and doing a daily update on their website with no human intervention whatsoever. They didn't have to change their regular operational procedures at all, and didn't have to assign anyone to keep the products on their website up to date. It just happened. Since then we've done similar things for clients using a wide variety of back-office software ranging from enterprise-level management systems right down to off-the-shelf accounting packages including MYOB, which just goes to show that it doesn't take anything fancy at your end. Almost any accounting package can be connected up in this way: the accounting system you use right now can probably handle it. A perfect example is Plaster Funhouse, who maintain all their product information in MYOB as a normal part of running their business. Some minor customisation of their MYOB setup allows them to store additional information like the name of an image to associate with each product, a long description of each product, and the current stock level, and all this data is bulk-transferred to their website using an import system developed by IVT that converts it to the necessary format for display on the site. Another example is Shaver Shop, who maintain their product information in an enterprise-level back-office system that performs a daily export which is then transferred to the website. The Shaver Shop system is 100% hands-off: they don't ever need to touch the system or think about how the products appear on their website, because it's all done totally automatically every day using fresh data from their existing back-office system. A slightly more unusual example is Complete PC Solutions, who don't even need to maintain the product information themselves: it's pulled from data feeds provided by suppliers. The 21,000 products on the Complete PC site are updated daily with the latest prices and stock levels, and even the product categories are maintained automatically. If a supplier adds a whole new product category containing a new range of products it just appears on the website with no human intervention and they are immediately available for customers to order. I hope these examples have shown that it's possible to have a website that's kept up to date with minimal ongoing effort. Sometimes it can be tricky doing the initial setup necessary to handle automatic updates but once everything is in place it's set-and-forget: you just go about business as usual, and your website will always reflect the very latest products and pricing. I love it when we can make things so easy you don't have to think about it!