We have oversold some hot items during the holiday rush. All I can attribute it to is selling the items in the store before the qty feed in sent back to Amazon. Of course this is usually when the qty on hand amount is 1 or 2.
To fool Amazon with our Quantity amounts is it possible to take the field mapping for Quantity and make it Quantity -1 or use the override? I understand this applies to a whole category and not an individual item and we obviously would not want to actually adjust the qty on hand in RMS. I would love to do this at an item level of course but I really can’t figure out that one with the Amazon mapping.
I really only want to identify certain products for this. What do you think about the following:
If I created a department called seasonal or holiday and moved the hot items into there then for that department map the amazon field to a marketplace field with a qty adjustment.
THe only drawback is having to remove the product from it’s standard department where most people would look for it. But isn’t there a way to map a product to two departments or categories with the PAM item navigation assignment? I’ll research your KB about this.
it is possible to have the same item in more than one department. However, behind the scenes it is still the same item, it is just bi-located.
More importantly, from the point of view of the Amazon integration, the information fed to Amazon won’t change as we use the mappings associated with the primary location rather than any additional location.
Perhaps an approach whereby we use the RMS product quantityavailable- quantitycommitted unless there is a figure in a particular PAM field would work. So by default we use the RMS stock level unless you choose to override it in a PAM field? Note that with this approach the override PAM stock field would need to manually maintained.
I can say for certainty that a manually maintained stock field isn’t going to work. We would probably just have the same problem.
You mentioned you feed the Amazon monster with mappings associated with the primary location. So if we set the primary location of these hot items in a seasonal or HOT ITEM department and secondarily place them in the department they should be in, would that work?
Also, in talking with everyone here, hot items are hot items and are probably going to do better on Amazon than on our own site, so just having the item in a hot items department where we can apply some formula to the quantity (qty=qty-1) then we all agreed here that would suffice.
moving the items in question to a new department called ‘HOT_ITEM’ through the RMS interface and then adding them to a secondary location (there original department) using the PAM interface should work. The new department will pop up on the Amazon interface as soon as it has items in it.
In this new department we can then map the Inventory/Quantity/Stock field from an unused marketplacefield. This marketplacefield can have a sync mapping of quantityavailable-quantitycommited-N where N can be 1 or more.
The only thing we have to be careful off is to ensure that the quantity pushed to Amazon is never less than 0 or the inventory feed fails (unlike RMS Amazon won’t accept a stock level of -1).
James
So the mapping for the new marketplace field should look like this:
case when (quantity-quantitycommitted-1 < 0) then 0 else quantity-quantitycommitted-1 end