Custom development or plug-in changes

Courier Tracking Integration

BPS Access Solutions commissioned us to develop a solution which collects tracking updates from their two couriers' web portals, integrates that information back into Sellerdeck, and then delivers a rich-content, branded tracking email to each customer within minutes of their order’s status being updated.

" At BPS, we place great value on keeping our customers up to date with order processing and tracking updates via direct communication, rather than relying on alerts from our couriers. This offers us a great follow-up opportunity on recent sales, as well as allowing us to be pro-active in our customer service." Dominic Austin.

Supplier Product Import

Courtyard Architectural Hardware came to us with a supplier spreadsheet containing over 8000 product lines which needed considerable manipulation to map into Sellerdeck. We used our Catalog Import Service to convert the data, whilst applying various adjustments such as:

• Grouping similar products into single products with attribute/choice options.
• Constructing a coherent, well formatted product description from multiple sources.
• Decoding product references to determine product features.
• Optimizing in-page SEO.

" Adding entire ranges of products would usually take us hundreds of hours... Codepath managed to import it in one click! " George Dudley.

Courier Order Integration

Leveraging our Order Export v4 solution as a starting point, we created a custom feed for AJS Motorcycles from Sellerdeck into the DHL courier portal, transferring orders, product lines and calculating weight categories, and turning the laborious manual task of producing the daily shipping manifest into a one-click function.

To July 2022

Order Export to Sage 200

Working closely with our client, we designed and implemented a custom Order Export feed which could be imported into Sage 200C’s Sales Ledger and Sales Order Processing modules. This was achieved by a combination of data extraction from Sellerdeck, static values, and translation mappings for tax codes, account numbers etc. The feed is transferred daily to allow onward accounting processing, and also to effect stock depletion in the back-office system.

Product Feed into Amazon

Our client, a vintage wine retailer, needed to automatically populate the complex Amazon product feed template for their particular business sector. Taking Sellerdeck product data as the source, and manipulating and augmenting that data where necessary, we used our Catalog Export plug-in, to create an automated feed which can be uploaded to Amazon daily in a matter of seconds.

Bulk Product Reference Update

One of the things a lot of long-term Sellerdeck users wish they’d done differently from the outset, is to not use automatic Sellerdeck product reference generation. Having arbitrary numbers assigned to product references, instead of meaningful SKUs, can seriously impede system integration with other back-end solutions, or supplier price imports. Manually changing the reference however can have all kinds of unforeseen consequences with sales history, HTML page names etc, not to mention being extremely time consuming! We have created an automated process to work from a simple 2-column spreadsheet (listing the old and new references), to update every area of Sellerdeck with the new codes, even historical orders, whilst ensuring your SEO is unaffected by changes in page names.

Various Product Extractions from Sellerdeck (Shopify, Magento 2 etc)

We have further adapted our popular and highly flexible Catalog Export tool to create custom product feeds compatible with various other systems, to allow our customers to use their product data for other projects.

Sellerdeck Quotation Generator

Often, if a customer requires a quotation, this is done long-hand in a word processor, as there is no facility in Sellerdeck. We created a utility that allowed our client’s order processors to enter quotations as a MOTO (Offline) Sellerdeck orders, and then save a ‘quotation’ in the form of a PDF, which could then be printed and/or emailed to the customer. The format and content was similar to that of a Sellerdeck invoice, but with the appropriate wording changed, and payment options suppressed. An order highlight colour was also automatically applied to the ‘order’ in Sellerdeck so that it was not processed until the quote was accepted; it could then be processed as a normal order.

Export / Re-import for Shipping Tables

One area of Sellerdeck which can be particularly challenging is making bulk updates to the shipping tables. Using the same principal as our Catalog Export / Re-Import tool, we created a plug-in that exported all the shipping tables (Zones, Zone country members, Classes, weight-based charges, value-based charges etc., into a multi-tab Excel spreadsheet. Bulk changes can then be easily applied to the required areas and the revised data re-imported back into Sellerdeck.

Sales Order Report (Grouped by Customer)

Sellerdeck has some basic sales order reports, but unless you operate the customer accounts facility, it is difficult to identify sales per customer to find out who your most active customers are. Using our Custom Reporting tool, we designed a report that broke down the sales exactly as the client required, and also included an order grouping function, which collated sales into a single ‘customer’ based on various factors such as postcode, house number and email address. Multiple orders over a long period of time, which were previously unreconcilable, immediately became sub-totaled into each customer’s activity, providing valuable marketing data.

Lapsed Customer Contact (under consideration)

Finally, we are looking at the possibility of a plug-in to allow you to automate the distribution of ‘reconnection’ emails with your lapsed customers. This would allow you to send an email to customers with a given number of historical orders over a definable period, but who have not ordered recently. If you are interested in hearing more about this development, please let me know and I will add you to the distribution list.

To January 2020

Gift Voucher Distribution

Clubhousegolf.co.uk, one of the leading online golf retailers in the UK, wanted to leverage Sellerdeck’s single-use coupon feature by offering gift vouchers for sale. Each unique voucher needed to be auto-generated as soon as the order was downloaded, then distributed via email as a PDF attachment. The near-real-time distribution of each voucher, via a customization of our Order Export plug-in, proved to be a great selling point and has provided a valuable revenue stream, especially on approach to celebration days such as Father’s Day and Christmas.

Import Courier Shipping Rates

Frazerpart.com, the Porsche parts specialists, were given comprehensive UK and worldwide shipping rates from their chosen courier, comprising a bewildering number of zones, classes and weight-based rates, in a complex, multi-tab spreadsheet. Using our Catalog Import plug-in, we were able to automate the process of converting this data into Sellerdeck shipping tables, saving hours, if not days of manual entry, and enabling future rate changes to be re-imported at a stroke. The result was to improve the competitiveness of their entire pricing structure by applying more accurate shipping charges on a per-order basis.

Import Orders to Sellerdeck from Woo-Commerce

Another of our clients runs both a Sellerdeck website and a separate site on the woo-commerce platform. They wanted the orders taken on the Woo site to be imported into the Sellerdeck order processing system to allow them to amalgamate the order processing function for both sales channels in one place. We achieved this via a custom implementation of our Order Import plug-in.

Product Capture Direct from Website

NaturalLiving.co.uk, offering a huge range of health and lifestyle products, needed to add a new product range to their website, but their supplier was not able to provide the necessary product data in any usable file format. With their express permission we were able to automate a process to read each HTML page of the supplier’s website, extract the pertinent product information, and create a product import file, which we subsequently imported into Sellerdeck using our popular Catalog Import plug-in.

Product Migration from Sellerdeck

Using a customized implementation of our Catalog Export plug-in, we successfully extracted the section, product, and permutation data from a long-standing client’s website into an alternative platform, so they could compare and contrast the two. The process involved generating an export file to a very specific format, as well as some character substitution and HTML reformatting to comply with the target platform’s stringent requirements.

Automated Drop Shipping and ‘Push’ Notifications

UKmapcentre.com, specialists in Ordinance Survey Mapping, set a goal to provide customized mapping products, in electronic format, within just a few minutes of the order being placed. This required a high level of automation combined with reliable and instant notification services. Firstly, we customized our Order Export plug-in to detect any new order received into Sellerdeck and submit fulfilment details directly to the map generator web-service (via XML/SOAP). Next, to allow monitoring of the successful turnaround of each order during the Christmas holidays, we leveraged Pushover (a ‘push’ notification service) to send instant confirmation to the site owner’s mobile phone that a new order had been received and notified them again when it was successfully forwarded for fulfilment. I am assured that the Christmas turkey tasted much better knowing that all was ticking along nicely!

To April 2019

Linnworks Link

Initial transfer of Sellerdeck product catalog to Linnworks inventory (Catalog Export plug-in) Daily transfer of Sellerdeck orders to Linnworks (Order Export plug-in) In Development: Daily update from Linnworks to Sellerdeck to create new products on the Sellerdeck website and ensure stock levels and prices are kept up to date for existing ones.

Create New Sellerdeck Products Direct from Supplier Website

Our Catalog Import plug-in has been a mainstay of our range of plug-ins for years, generating and maintaining Sellerdeck catalog content from a product listing file of some sort, usually exported from another system, or available from the products’ supplier. We were recently given the task of ‘screen scraping’ products (i.e. extracting the product data directly from the Supplier’s website – with their permission, of course) as no product listing file was available.

Need help getting commodity Codes, or other customs information onto your Sellerdeck Invoice?

Recent changes in regulations may mean that the product descriptions on your invoices are not sufficient when exporting goods outside of the UK. An often-overlooked feature of Sellerdeck is the ‘extended report description’. This can be populated with an alternative description, which is more suited to the invoice than to the website, and so can include data such as commodity codes and other customs requirements. Using our Catalog Export plug-in we exported the short description and various custom variables from Sellerdeck, then after amalgamating them in Excel, were able to re-import them back to the Sellerdeck extended description field.

eBay Product Feeds

Using our Catalog Export plug-in, we generate a daily set export feeds from Sellerdeck, in a format that can be imported directly into eBay, to generate new listings and maintain existing ones.

Direct Sales Order Integration for eBay, Amazon and CDiscount

A new high-volume version of our popular Order Import plug-in to integrate sales data from Amazon, eBay or the CDiscount platform, into Sellerdeck, without using export / import files.

Shopify Catalog Feed

One of our clients wanted to try setting up a new site in Shopify using a subset of their Sellerdeck site’s products. Using our Catalog Export plug-in, we generated a product feed that could be imported directly into Shopify, taking most of the manual work out of the project.