Do It For Me!

image_phpSmallOh! The drudge, for retailers, of entering all those values into a digital inventory in the computer. Then, there’s a risk of miss-typing values that change frequently into the digital inventory for people working with commodities whose prices fluctuate. The most frustrating and most common problem is, “I can’t get a program to do what I need it to do.”

All of these can be addressed through programming or database manipulation. These days, they often go hand-in-hand. What can programming or database work do for you as a business owner?

Many businesses have lots of information about their products, services and clients in a computer. This is often held in a database. So if you need to update prices on everything that is from California, in the color red and is currently priced under $50 then a onetime database this could be a daunting task. With right person manipulating your data one update may be all you need.

Perhaps you have a program where prices depend on commodities like oil, gold, and silver or such and the prices change often. How can you update all your prices when one or more parts of a product are changing in price frequently? And what do you do about all the arithmetic in figuring the price; a single slip can be very costly. Rather than marking these products as “call for price” a program alteration could calculate the price when your web site visitor selects it.

Recently, I had a shop call which deals in goods that contain one or more commodities. They have a very nice web presence all done by their in-house staff. However, as with most programs that are commonly available it does not cover the needs of all vendors. Since I am a customer of the above shop, when they found I do programming they asked me to help them. Some of their metal items were priced close to the price of gold or silver and any change in the metal prices could make a big difference. A simple program could have them enter the price of gold and silver each morning. However, if the price rises, people could then flood their web site with orders buying at a price that is below what the market is currently paying for the metal. This would be a big money losing deal and they may not see it happening until they filled the orders for the day.

The solution for them is to have a live commodities data available for them so that when a customer checks a product the price is calculated at the moment the customer clicks on the product. This was done by adding to the existing database they have and adding to the shopping cart program they have been using. Now they are adding these metal products to their web store.

If you have a vexing problem for your business, you might check to see if programming or database work can help you. Local computer programmers can help you with your needs and often work with web designers to make your programs available to where you need them.

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  1. jesse - . thanks!!