We are looking to create a system to organize and keep track of “for sale” offers and “want to buy” requests from our suppliers and customers. Additionally we would like to track market prices and trends using this data. On a daily basis we receive offers and requests of merchandise, and at all times we want to keep track of these offers.
Typical request/offer scenario;
– A customer calls/emails/IMs us and requests/offers a model.
– I need to go to our system, select the company that made the request/offer, the representative spoken to, select the manufacturer, model, quantity, spec, price and any notes regarding the offer
– System should also track the date of the request/offer
BACKEND:
– Create possible brokering opportunities by matching offers and requests. We would like the system to automatically flag any item listed “for sale” at a lower price than another vendors “want to buy” price for the same item (same make, model, etc). The system should help us to match up these items by displaying the matching entries on the same line. This difference between the buying price and the selling price should be configurable. For example we should be able to enter $10 and the system will show buying requests that are at least $10 higher than the selling offer for the same make/model/spec. We should also be able to enter $0 or even a negative number -$5 and it will show us matches where the buying price is $5 above the selling price or less. This is useful if we think we have items that are “almost a match” and we can talk people into making a profitable deal.
FRONTEND: See attached drawing
– Offer/requests will be input using drop down boxes and the choices for these drop down boxes will be created by us ahead of time. There will be drop downs for offer or request, manufacturer, model, spec, price, company, contact, notes.
o The contact field will only show in the list as the persons name, but when you click on the persons name it will show their contact details in a separate box on the page (the same box where you entered the contact details in the first palce). These contact details will be entered whenever a new contact is added. So for example if a person’s name is john from the company cellstore, when you add him as a choice on the drop down list, the entry field will have room for contact info. The system should be smart enough to know that john from one company is not the same as john from another company. In other words the contact drop down list, should only be available after a company has been selected.
o The notes field will be a text box rather than a drop down, but we will not use the notes field to filter the data
– Once you have selected all the info from the drop down boxes you can click “add” and it will enter the offer/request into the system and clear out all the drop down choices to blanks. If you hit “add +” it will add the item to the system and will only clear make, model, spec, price. It will leave the values for company and contact the same. This is to make it easier if you have multiple offers from the same company on different models. There is also a clear button which clears all the drop down boxes.
– The data fields will be referred to as attributes for the purpose of this explanation.
– In reference to the attached drawing, the blank boxes are how new attributes are added. You type “iphone” into the model box for example, and hit update, the model iphone is then available as a choice in the drop down list for models. If you want to change this attribute you choose it from the drop down box and update it. So for example you would choose the just added model iphone from the drop down list above, and type a new name for it into the blank box. So if you type iPhone 4 and hit update, you will replace the old entry “iphone” with the new one “iPhone 4”
– The system should also be able to input offer/requests from a standard format CSV file.
Display offers and requests
– There will be two scrollable boxes on the screen, one for buy offers, and the other for sell offers. There will be a drop down box to filter the list by different choices. One choice will be to see all entries. There should also be a choice for each manufacturer of phone. The final filter will be “matches”
– If we want to edit an entry in the list we will do it in the following way
o Click on the entry in the list
o All of the attributes for this entry will then appear in the blank data boxes where you normally enter a new attribute. If you type a new value into any of these boxes and hit update, it will overwrite that one piece of data for the list entry.
o There should also be the ability to delete entries in bulk. For example selecting 10 lines in the list, and the clicking a delete button so that we can easily remove old entries.
– I have described the project as best as I can, there may be changes as things progress along the way, but as I imagine it, this is the system we require.
THE KEY IS SIMPLICITY AND EASY OF USE SINCE THIS CAN BE EXTREMELY TIME CONSUMING GIVEN SOME COMPANIES’ LONG STOCK OFFER LISTS
