In an effort to improve the existing services at Inventorysource.com, we proudly introduce ‘Advanced Inventory Control Tools’ to better manage your Inventory Data Feeds and get you complete control over your wholesale drop ship product data feed formatting.  Using the new tools is very simple, and following the instructions below will make customizing your wholesale dropship product listings, regardless of your ecommerce platform, a piece of cake! Read on...

To gain access to the new tools login to your Inventorysource.com account and click ‘Custom Price Settings’. On this page click on ‘edit’

After you click on edit you will get the following screen with the access to the newly added toolset:

We would start with:
‘Edit Category Mappings’

The Category Mapping Tool allows you to have total control over what categories load to your website and the format they appear.  This is very important when selling from multiple suppliers.  One supplier might have a category called "Laptops" while the other supplier might use the term "Notebooks".  You can select the format you like and have future products load with the specific naming format you provide from your wholesale dropship suppliers.  Also, some suppliers have large catalogs and you might want to still have the automation service, but customize your website for a more niche or specific product type.  You can use the filtering tool to exclude whole main categories or remove an subcategories that you feel might cause a distraction on your website.  This custom tool is an amazing feature. 

1. 
   You can block categories that you have no interest in selling like "Display Cases" at both the Main Category and Sub Category levels.  You can create a unique structure that allows products from multiple distributors to form a cohesive catalog navigation.  You can change the capitalization format for your category display or improve the category naming format.  You can even use the tool to help trim a large catalog down to the specific items you prefer simply to help save space on your hosting account.
   
   When you click on ‘Edit Category Mapping’ you will see the following screen:

Here on this screen checking on ‘Exclude from update’ will make sure that the checked category is never added/updated on your website. You need to make sure that if the category is already present on your website after you save changes on this screen you will need to manually delete the category from your Store’s Administration.

1. Checking on ‘replace with Manufacturer name’ will replace the name of the category with the name of the Manufacturer supplying the products under that particular category
2. ‘Replace with Custom Category’ fields are used if you need to change the name of the top level category given by the supplier. For eg. In the screenshot above If we want ‘Fragrances for everyone’ (top level category from supplier) to show as ‘Unisex Fragrances’ on the website, we would need to write the name in the box provided.

‘Edit Price Overrides’
The Price Override Tool allows you to remain competitive on your wholesale drop ship product prices, while still saving you time.  The global price setting tools allow you a wide variety of price setting options from tiered structured to cents ending values.  However, you might not want everything on your site to sell at a 10%  or $10 margin, and price tiers might not allow you to be as specific as you like on some hot selling items, brands, categories or even to more closely match a steep discount that your supplier might have provided to you for your reseller account. You can instantly set a general price strategy for all of your products with the Custom Price Setting Tool in your account.  This new Edit Price Override Tool allows you to select specific wholesale dropship items with their own price or their own custom markup.  This means your general price setting will be applied to all products, and any product with this specific price will have that unique structure applied.

This screen is reached when you click edit on ‘Custom price settings’ shown above. Click on ‘edit price overrides’ to gain access to this filter. The page would look like this:


Let’s start with ‘Current Price Overrides’. This would show if you have any price overrides defined in the past. The area below called as ‘Add new price override’ will add a new price override for the SKU you will choose and this price override as the name suggest will override all existing price settings for this particular SKU. See below an example when a SKU is entered and the options you can explore:


Here for this particular SKU we can enter a unique price markup that would be applied to this SKU ONLY.
We will now jump to the third new advanced product filter called:
‘Edit Product Filters’
The Product Filtering Tool allows you to trim your catalog in seconds. 
When you have thousands of products on your website from your supplier it is difficult to allow new products to load while still removing some product types from your store.  This can easily be done in bulk with the category tool, but what if there are some specific product issues you want to avoid.  The product filtering tool allows you to further customer your wholesale dropship website catalog across all categories with a few easy options.  You can block products that do not have a valid image file from the supplier from showing on your site.  You can prevent issues with very low dollar items, such as some parts that some suppliers sell.  This option might allow you to customize your price settings to still use a percent margin markup up without a fixed dollar addition applied without fearing any issues from selling items which might only be a few dollars in cost.  You can also exclude large cost items from your site if you want to specialize the product price range for your catalog.  Also, some users prefer to display MAP items while others would rather focus their catalog listings for products where they have more room to customize their full profit margin range or discounts.  The Product Filtering Tool allows you more options to list the products you want to sell rather then just listing all products from your supplier sources.

You can reach this tool on ‘Custom Price Settings’ page as shown below:



Upon clicking ‘Edit Product Filters’ you will see the following screen with advanced control options:



Let’s learn how to use each of the four options:

1. ‘Exclude SKU’ will exclude that particular SKU from the daily update process, will deactivate it from your store, and will make sure it is never added back on the website.
2. ‘Exclude Brand’ will ensure that the selected brand and all associated products that match that value for the brand are not added to your store. Please note if it’s already present on your store these products will be deactivated. With some suppliers you might find they list some products with the short version and some with the long long version of the brand name.  You can exclude both with this tool as needed.
3. ‘Additional Exclude Options’ is used if:
   1) You need to exclude all products without images on your store.
   2) To exclude any products which have MAP price condition applied so that only those products remain on the store which do not have MAP price associated with them.
   3) ‘Enable exclusion of products priced with MSRP lower than’ and ‘higher than’ are used if you do not products from a specific price range removed from your store.
   4) You need to apply filter directly on the data feed to have the products block if the available quantity falls below a certain value. Eg: You can have any products with quantity available less than 10 excluded. In this case you will enter '10' in the field.