Project description
Jet Lister is a SaaS program that includes about 100 users and allows them to efficiently manage the posting of products in various marketplaces. It has convenient functionality for managing inventory, editing, creating templates of products, keeping track of pricing, and other things.Project summary
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Industry: eCommerce |
Expertise: eCommerce development |
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Business goals: to manage posting of products in various marketplaces, to help with managing inventory in an efficient way |
Applied technologies: PHP, Rabbit MQ |
Business Challenge
Every marketplace, such as Amazon, Walmart, Pricefalls, and eBay, has its own system for uploading/posting products. Initially, our client had an idea for creating an option that would support more efficient posting in Jet, as it seemed to be quite complicated at that time and had various cons in terms of functionality.
Solution
For us, this was one of the first e-commerce projects we worked on which showed the way for us to move forward and learn more about this realm of software development in general.
At first, we followed our client’s concept regarding effective and quick creation of products exactly in Jet. After this was done and everything worked the way the client wanted, the next step was to create something similar for Walmart. That’s why we needed to update all the information and functions in order for it to work.
One of the important things that we created was a function in regard to UPC analysis, as while the product was being posted, the availability of the existing UPC for this item was checked in parallel. If this UPC was detected, the program made sure to connect the old and new UPCs together, so that there would be no separate products, but one single product (with connected UPCs).
Then we worked on adding a new feature for the Walmart marketplace in the program: the ability to edit the product and add useful information and create descriptions.
One of the valuable features we have also added was the mapping of categories, structuring these categories for different products. For example, for eBay, it was necessary for the system to map the most precise category for each item.
Also, the option to create a template of products on eBay was implemented, giving the client an opportunity to generate an HTML version of the template, decorating the header, footer, and logotype. In this way, the product visually appeared on sale according to the respective template.
Products on eBay could have certain statuses, for example, “completed”. After the status is shown as completed, the product cannot be posted again, because the ID for this product is completed and “closed” as well. Here we made a new option to delete the old ID of such a product and to create a new one. In this way, there was no need to create and post all the same products anew, entirely from scratch, as the new ID could be created for them.
Besides, as there were sometimes issues with UPC on eBay, it was not always accepted by the marketplace, for instance. That is why we created a UPC regenerator.
It works like this: the user needs to choose a product and then choose to regenerate the UPC, an entirely new one. If the product with this UPC has already been posted before, it is not possible to post another product with the same UPC, which is why its regeneration is important.
The Jet Lister program also included checking orders, changes and updating things if needed. We used SKUVault for warehouses, Shipstation for Amazon.
We also developed a feature for repricing, especially for Walmart. As for the functionality, it checked competitors’ prices, whether they were higher or lower, after analyzing Walmart reports.
On Walmart and eBay, after our implementation, it also became possible to post “variations”. For example, if there is a product on sale, it usually has UPC and ASIN, and this product can have some variations, for example in color and sizes. And we made a feature that would allow for selecting “parent” products and then seeing all of their sub-products that were essentially variations. They had to have a common identifier, for instance, “parent” ASIN. So the program analyzed, detected, and eventually showed such differentiation and connection of products at the same time, as parents and sub-products.
Delivered results
Over the course of a few years, we’ve come from a modest initial project with a handful of functions required to a full program that allows various options, starting with posting products in different marketplaces, editing and creating templates to analyzing and changing pricing, checking UPCs, mapping categories for products and analyzing the possible existing variations of items.