An ERP catalogue is organised for the people who buy and count stock. A storefront is organised for the people who shop. Those are rarely the same shape, and the gap between them is where most of the manual work in running an online shop actually lives.
Take a light fitting. In ERPNext it might be called “Ceiling LED Light 24W 3000K Warm White”, sit
under Products > Lighting > Ceiling, and carry one price. A shopper looking for it wants to filter
by room, by colour temperature, and by whether it is on offer this week. None of that is a field
anybody typed, but all of it is sitting in the name.
Transformation rules close that gap on the way out. The item in ERPNext does not change. What reaches the shop does.
Classifying from the product name
The most useful rules read the name and work out what the product is. One of our customers has ninety-five of them, built up over time, and between them they turn a plain catalogue into something shoppers can filter.
A rule matching 3000K or Warm White in the item name sets a colour_temp of 3000k. Another
catches 4000K or Neutral White, a third 6000K or Cool White, and a fourth picks up CCT or
Tuneable White and sets both a colour temperature and a capability, because a tuneable fitting is
a different thing to sell. RGB anywhere in the name marks the product as colour changing.
The rules go further than attributes. One matches ceiling light or ceiling lamp and classifies
the product as suitable for a bedroom, hallway, bathroom or kitchen. Another matches chandelier
and files it under lounge, dining room and entrance, on the reasoning that chandeliers belong in
double height spaces. That is retail knowledge which previously lived in somebody’s head and now
lives in a rule, applied consistently to every product that arrives.
Nobody retypes any of this. The buyer names the item the way they always have, and the shop ends up with filters that work.
Tidying the category tree
ERP category trees grow a root that means something internally and nothing to a customer. A
catalogue might file everything under Product before it gets to anything useful, so a fitting
lands in Product > Smart Stuff > Magnetic and a shopper sees a top level category called
“Product” containing the entire shop.
A slice rule drops the first level on the way out. Product > Smart Stuff > Magnetic becomes
Smart Stuff > Magnetic, and the storefront’s navigation starts where the customer’s interest
starts. The ERP keeps its root, because the people working in it have reasons for it.
Choosing a different price list
Sales are the other thing that wants to differ between the two systems. You keep a Black Friday
price list in ERPNext alongside your standard one, because that is a sensible way to run a
promotion. A rule says to take the sale price from the list named Black Friday when an item
appears on it, and the storefront shows that price struck through against the usual one. When the
promotion ends and the item comes off the list, the sale price goes away on its own.
The same mechanism runs a month end list for one customer, and nothing about it is special to Black Friday. Any list you keep can be the sale price for any shop, which also means two shops can run different promotions from the same catalogue at the same time.
Stock from the warehouses that count
A business with several warehouses rarely wants all of them visible online. Stock held for trade counter walk ins, or sitting in transit, should not be promised to a web customer.
A warehouse filter solves it in one line: show stock from Stores only. The shop sees the quantity
in the warehouse that actually serves it, and the rest of your stock stays where it belongs, which
is in the ERP for the people who need the whole picture.
The small things add up
A handful of rules do unglamorous work that nobody wants to do by hand. One of our customers sets an SEO focus keyword on every product from its item name, so the shop’s SEO plugin has something to work with without a person opening each product to type it.
It is a small rule. Multiplied across a catalogue it is a week of somebody’s life, and unlike the week it replaces it stays correct when the product is renamed.
Where to start
Most people start with one rule and a specific irritation: a category tree that reads badly, or a promotion that keeps having to be set up twice. Rules are evaluated in priority order and can be scoped to one shop, so a change can be tried on a single storefront before it applies everywhere.
See pricing or talk to us about what your catalogue would need.
