[CourtneyNHS]

Is there a way to Highlight a bunch of similar items and change their Prices all at once? I have to update pricing on 100-200 packs of seeds, they are all the same price. I would love to be able to simultaneously update them all.

[RetailEdge Moderator]

Courtney,

Good question and one we get a lot. The short answer is no. The way RetailEdge works is that we only update prices/costs as products are received. So you would typically make an order for new items (typically pricing goes up but in the computer industry they tend to go down) and then as they come in the pricing would be changed. You can manually change them but as you see this might take a long time because you need to open the editor for the item and then go to the price and then change and save the record. In your case 200 times.

Changing pricing (and or costs) in inventory presents many issues. For instance if you are changing pricing, is it just temporary (discounting for a sale) or more permanent (to reduce the pricing because of manufacturer's incentives or just to move old product out). Or in your case it sounds like you are trying to change pricing on a product line either before it comes in or for items that you might not be receiving because you don't stock them. Price changes also have tagging/labelling implications. Some people tag everything, some use shelf labels and some don't tag at all (use UPCs). Some people don't want to change the pricing of items before they are actually received, since then the clerks need to be aware that an item is "old" and properly discount the item.

These are some of the issues and we are aware of them and are working on ways to make it easier to have these changes made to RetailEdge's data. But we want to be able to do it in a controlled fashion and make sure that the user understands the implications of what they are doing especially when they have the potential to mess up a lot of data quickly.

Since you are on a service plan it probably would not be too hard for us to write an SQL statment that you could run using SQL runner in RetailEdge. However, this would only work if you have some set criteria we can use. For instance "change all items with SKU beginning with "ABC" and having a price of $5 change to $5.50 (or some percentage).

If you don't think you can come up with this criteria another way might be:

1. Export your inventory to a REDI file (.txt). Filter this as much as possible. In your case you might do it just for items that are in the SEEDs department and from one particular vendor. If you are only changing one location's pricing then filter for this location as well.

2. Immediately after exporting the file, import the file (Tools|Import). As you import it choose "Inventory Import" and Update/Replace Existing Records only.

3. Press Next and on the following screen choose "View as Text". You will then see a list of all the items you exported. You can then cursor over to the field you are trying to change quickly and then change the price.
You could also outside of RetailEdge open this file in Excel and make the changes there but this would potentially cause more issues for you as Excel has CSV conversion problems.

Another solution if you are going to be changing many different prices (e.g., Price 1 - 5 for a number of locations) and all the prices can be similarily changed from one value to another, is to take the txt file and open it in a program like wordpad or notepad and do a search and replace. Then save the file again and import it into RetailEdge. If you are familiar with Windows this would even be faster than changing every price in a list.

Hopefully this helps.

Is there a way to Highlight a bunch of similar items and change their Prices all at once? I have to update pricing on 100-200 packs of seeds, they are all the same price. I would love to be able to simultaneously update them all.

[CourtneyNHS]

Thanks for the explanation.

I ended up changing each one by hand because they needed to receive these products. Over the course of 2 days at a cost of 7 hours. I added new items and changed the price on the old items like it that needed to be updated. a total of 158 items, 14 mouse clicks per item to change the cost and price = 2212 mouse clicks. all for little packets of seed that retail for $3.29.

1. It would be great to have some kind of copy function that fills in all info but the description & stock Number when you have to add a bunch of new items.

2. It would be really helpful to be able to work on pricing updates on items and then have a button that activates it all at once. That way I could communicate to all of our locations that a price change is going to happen and have it prepared before hand. This would keep me from having to bite my price changes up into little bits and drag it out over the course of a week. I only have two hours before our stores open to do price changes each day. I cant even prepare data before hand for a change. As it stands now, unless I'm missing something, I have to change one by one by one..... frustratingly slow. The option of writing a SQL seems promising, but I don't want to have to call tech support and wait for a special utility to be made. I need to do this stuff now! I need the capability to change blocks of information without having to import & export data between different programs.

Thanks for trying to help,
Courtney

[RetailEdge Moderator]

There is a simpler way of creating new items. It uses the Quick Lookups function and why this function was created.

In receiving and POs you will see a check box in the lower right hand corner of the receiving editor labeled Quick Lookups? Maybe this is mis-named but it essentially is a Quick Copy function. To use it:

1. Copy an item Stock Number from inventory that you want to use the information from. You can use the windows copy and past functionality (Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V).

2. Add an item to Receiving or a Purchase Order. Make sure the Quick Lookups box is checked and Paste the Stock Number into the Stock Number field of the item you are creating. This will bring all the existing items information into the receiving editor. But what is different when Quick Lookups is checked is that if you backspace out the Stock Number (or a portion of the Stock Number) you will see the item information on the right hand side changes to N/A. This means you are now working on a new item. So all you have to do is change the item's Stock Number and maybe the description and you are all set.

Be careful with this function as this can cause some people to create new items when they don't want and change existing ones that they don't want to change. A good rule of thumb would be to leave it unchecked unless you are sure you want to create new/similar items.

This should save you lots of steps when creating new items.

On your second issue I am still a little unclear about how and when you are doing pricing changes. Maybe if you explain in detail when you get a chance your procedures and reasons for doing making the pricing changes I might be able to come up with a better solution for you. Are you doing pricing changes without receiving new products? Are the prices for all the items you are receiving similar? Are the price changes you are making for your items the same in every location? Are you using Price levels?

I am sure you know that price changes don't go into effect until the product is received and updated. So until you push the update button inventory pricing stays the same. You can leave things in there as long as you want although this might get in the way of some of the other receiving you are doing.

Also when changing pricing for multiple locations you know you have an option to change all pricing for all locations at once. This option can be found on the Misc tab for the location settings. If you change the Price 1 field for an item this will change all prices (sugg retail and price 1 5 for all locations). This will allow you to just change the price in one location.

Let me know about the procedures and what you are trying to accomplish when you get a chance (in between all the clicking).

Thanks for the explanation.

I ended up changing each one by hand because they needed to receive these products. Over the course of 2 days at a cost of 7 hours. I added new items and changed the price on the old items like it that needed to be updated. a total of 158 items, 14 mouse clicks per item to change the cost and price = 2212 mouse clicks. all for little packets of seed that retail for $3.29.

1. It would be great to have some kind of copy function that fills in all info but the description & stock Number when you have to add a bunch of new items.

2. It would be really helpful to be able to work on pricing updates on items and then have a button that activates it all at once. That way I could communicate to all of our locations that a price change is going to happen and have it prepared before hand. This would keep me from having to bite my price changes up into little bits and drag it out over the course of a week. I only have two hours before our stores open to do price changes each day. I cant even prepare data before hand for a change. As it stands now, unless I'm missing something, I have to change one by one by one..... frustratingly slow. The option of writing a SQL seems promising, but I don't want to have to call tech support and wait for a special utility to be made. I need to do this stuff now! I need the capability to change blocks of information without having to import & export data between different programs.

Thanks for trying to help,
Courtney

[DAVE]

The problem we have found with the "quick" look-up function is it is not quick at all. When you type in the stock #, the program adds ea. character laborously slow ( I guess while it is doing the look-up). It can take up to a half a minute sometimes for one sku to get entered.
This price change issue has been a constant issue and problem. I wonder why it has not been moved up to the top of your "wishlist". Seems to me this would benefit all customers, and at least as much as improving touch screen options which only benefit some customers.

[RetailEdge Moderator]

We have added some new label printing and copying quantity functions to PO/TO/Receiving that might help speed up this process for you.

We have also added a performance enhancement to the find operations that might help your inventory lookups.

On the Quick Lookup, this procedure should be very fast. But as you get more items into your inventory it will slow down. We will look into seeing whether we can apply the same enhancements to the quick lookup feature.

The problem we have found with the "quick" look-up function is it is not quick at all. When you type in the stock #, the program adds ea. character laborously slow ( I guess while it is doing the look-up). It can take up to a half a minute sometimes for one sku to get entered.
This price change issue has been a constant issue and problem. I wonder why it has not been moved up to the top of your "wishlist". Seems to me this would benefit all customers, and at least as much as improving touch screen options which only benefit some customers.

[RetailEdge Moderator]

One of our RetailEdge users who is pretty proficient in Excel, has been using the following Excel spreadsheet functions when importing data. This might work for you as well.

vLookup. This will allow you to compare old and new records so you can compare old and new values in seconds. For instance you might want to quickly see which items in a list are new from the last imported file. Or you might want to see which items have had a price change.

TEXT(D3,"000000") is very good to help keep leading zeros in the Item_ID when exporting and reimporting. RetailEdge ItemIDs and Universal Product Codes can have leading zeros (i.e., 000544, 087654321111). When Excel sees a value like this it will think it is a number and remove the leading zeros. The Text Function will format the field and force the value in the above example to have 6 characters.

I’ve been Exporting and Re-Importing is likely not for everyone, but it seems to work for me, especially with seasonal inventory that clears out and is then re-ordered.

Is there a way to Highlight a bunch of similar items and change their Prices all at once? I have to update pricing on 100-200 packs of seeds, they are all the same price. I would love to be able to simultaneously update them all.