online and offline blend

[Fsirett]

I am new to the forum and to osCommerce, but I have been doing my homework and I hope to avoid being a drag on the system. I know that is a lost hope, but we can only dream.

 

I have an actual bookshop open and in full vigour at the moment. I am looking at introducing an online shop alongside. My question is this: How do I establish a connection between my offline sales and my online inventory so I can delete stock from my inventory instantly when sold on either side.

 

I should explain that I sell second-hand books (and others) and often have one item in stock and my stock changes quite quickly. I will be establishing a bar-coding system and would like to use this as a complete point of sale tool. When the bar is read I would like to be able to have it automatically update everything if that is possible.

I assume this is a simple matter of scripting and may mean looking elsewhere for the answers.

 

Cheers.

 

Frank Sirett

Barcelona, Spain

 

PS Despite my address, I am a native English speaker

[shooter-boy]

Frank,

 

This is entirely doable, but the simplest option IMO is to setup your osCommerce store as your main database and have a POS system developed for it so you actually process sales through the online store.

 

Of course if you have existing POS infrastructure, it may not be feasible.

 

You can probably get the databases to talk to each other but will require custom programming to get it to work.

 

Of course, you can use Easy Populate to manually adjust stock levels quite easily, but can become quite a handful if you are dealing with many items, and would not update instantly.

 

Rob

[Fsirett]

Dear Rob,

Good grief that was fast!

I have no POS in place at the moment, I am going to buy a bar-code reader during an anticipated move. I thought that the osCommerce database looks quite suitable; How much do we really need?

 

I think(!?) all we really need is a system that automatically sets up a shopping cart that is filled in when an in shop sale is made that will go through automatically. This is possible to do manually, but on a busy day, I will not be able to go through with any speed at all.

 

I am hoping to find a package written that will do this automatically. I can't believe I am the only one with this problem.

 

Cheers,

 

Frank Sirett

 

Frank,

 

This is entirely doable, but the simplest option IMO is to setup your osCommerce store as your main database and have a POS system developed for it so you actually process sales through the online store.

 

Of course if you have existing POS infrastructure, it may not be feasible.

 

You can probably get the databases to talk to each other but will require custom programming to get it to work.

 

Of course, you can use Easy Populate to manually adjust stock levels quite easily, but can become quite a handful if you are dealing with many items, and would not update instantly.

 

Rob

[burt]

Have a look at OllaCart. http://www.ollacart-pos.com/

[Fsirett]

Cheers! I am going there now

 

 

Have a look at OllaCart. http://www.ollacart-pos.com/

[Fsirett]

OllaCart looks like it is exactly what I need. Noot badly priced, either!

 

Cheers for that!

 

Frank Sirett

 

Cheers! I am going there now