I almost forgot to write about this project.
One of the hardest things to do in eCommerce is keep your product inventory synced with the warehouse, particularly if you have both eCommerce and physical stores. Fjallraven.us wanted to take their ability to the next level, so they asked us to build sync functionality between their master inventory database and Shopify. The tough part wasn’t syncing, Shopify’s API made that pretty easy (although their throttling makes it painfully slow), it was matching the products on the web with products in the database. Some products had incorrect names, colors, sizes, and even SKUs! To solve this problem I made a quick Excel file that cleaned up the majority of products (thousands) leaving only a couple hundred that had to be done manually. Once we matched the products, we updated the bar codes on Shopify (note to self, never upload products somewhere without bar-codes). Using the bar-codes we can do a nightly sync of inventory numbers. A real-time sync would have been better, but that is not what the client paid for. Maybe next time!
Live Project Link: http://www.fjallraven.us/
