MOM users can sync data specific to one product, or not

E-commerce merchants who use Mail Order Manager for their internal order management needs can integrate with Total Blue System, sending a daily feed of product data to the website. You can configure what data is sent and how it behaves (updates products once, or updates continuously overwriting what's there, etc.). But prior to the latest system update, you could only control this site-wide.

• Now you can control it on a per product basis. A new "Disable Import from MOM" check box on the edit product screen in the Catalog module's Admin Area enables this feature.

Why might you want to do this?

As background, the MOM integration assumes that the product be displayable on the website, if the CANNOT SELL field in MOM is NOT checked. So, if you can sell it in MOM, it's on the website to be displayed.

Each night, the settings for the product are updated from MOM, and this includes the Displayable? field, which is nightly set to Yes. It's set to "Yes" because the Cannot Sell field is unchecked, and it's not Discontinued with inventory less than 1. These are the conditions that need be met to display the product on the website.

Would you like to hide products on the website, even though the product meets all the "sell online" conditions in MOM? Maybe because of a print catalog you must be able to take orders for the product by phone, but your website presentation of the product isn't ready yet? Or you have terms established by your suppliers that restrict on-line sell dates. Whatever the reason, here's how:

1. Mark the product as Displayable? = No.
2. Then check the  new "Disable Import from MOM" check box.

Comments

[Patrick Pitman]

Some clients say that this feature is unnecessary.

One comment was "The current system (before this new feature) worked fine for us - even though we have some products that are NOT checked CANNOT SELL in MOM but that we nevertheless do NOT want to display on the website. Our solution to this is merely to not categorize these particular products."

In fact, that's not a good solution. The better solution is to do as described above and make use of this new feature.

Fact #1
Prior to this latest System Update, a product could still be found on the site EVEN if it's not categorized. Site search results might show it, as might related products from articles or FAQ's.

Fact #2
As part of this System Update, the product detail page will NOT display a product that is NOT categorized. So categorize your products, including those that are "related" to another product. The links to these products, which might be visible, will result in a "page cannot be found" error upon click-through.

Fact #3
Allowing for the reality of Fact #2, Fact #1 is still true. There are still links that could possibly lead a site visitor to viewing a product that is not categorized. There's lots of links to products within Total Blue System and we've not updated every template everywhere to control for the display of products that are not categorized.

What all this means is that this new feature about disabling a data sync between MOM and a given product on the website is a useful, necessary feature today. Enjoy!