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BO, BL Potential Business Application
Hi,
Hope all doing well. My name is Kaveh and I'm the owner of TECHNO BRICK store on both BL and BO. I have been a fan and a seller for many years. about 10 years on BL and one of the relatively early adopters of BO. I have a full time job as a Network Engineer and selling Lego is my hobby/second job. I'm also an application developer and have completed several commercial projects during last couple of years with some of my projects being used in some corporations.
To make the story short, for last couple of years, I have been developing a web-based business application which is a focal point in my Lego business. The idea came to mind when I had to manage my inventory over Bl and Ebay. The software has gone through several revisions and is currently used on a daily basis for almost everything that I do on BL and BO. Here are some of the features that I currently have on the software:
1. Purchasing : Creating purchase quote/purchase order/purchase receipt. Automatic creation of SKU for any Lego part, receiving items from PO into your inventory. Cost calculations, account association, shipping/tax aspects of purchasing.
2. Sales: creating sales quote/sales order /sales invoice/ invoicing, Pricing, discounting, margin/profit calculations on each sale and shipping/tax aspects of sale
3. Inventory Management : Comprehensive view of your inventory (qty, avg.cost, last cost,reserved qty, allocated qty...), Manual SKU creation, item location, replenishment, etc
4. Part out : Set catalog, Set cost analysis, part cost calculation, part out work order creation, automatic addition of parts and costs to inventory.
5. Kits, Kit creation, kit cost analysis, kit work order creation and automatic subtraction of parts from the inventory
6. Store Manager-Inventory : Individual BL and BO store inventory management & pricing, qty on order, qty in store, markup.... Price comparison, (competition view), synchronization through API (can synchronize your inventory with both BL,BO)
7.Store Manager - Orders : local download of all orders through API and conversion to final Sales order.
8.Accounting : Keep track of purchasing, sales, shipping costs, charges, discounts, business fees, bank accounts, transfers,...balance sheet..etc
9. Reports : various reports such as weekly, monthly, yearly sales, part count sales, order count ... etc. Also, some analysis regarding best selling products and inventory level, etc...
10. Database management :various setting and definition for the software, such as master catalogs, accounts, etc..
I know, that was too much as an introduction. #:-S . Now, call me crazy but I have a passion for this type of things and it has been working for me
.
Now, the question is that if any other seller care about having such an app and how much dose it worth to them. The point is that, this app (although very polished now) requires lot of work if I wanted to invest my time into it to move it to public domain. After API offering by both BL and BO the game has changes a lot and now it's much more secure and open to pull/push data.
I also have many other ideas for future such as integration with Paypal, Ebay, Amazon, etc... But it really all depends on potential of such an app.
So, I need your feedback, Let me know what you think. I'm specially interested to know the sellers with large inventory. All comments are welcome though. If I do such a thing one day, it will be offered to all users. Not Free, but at a reasonable cost.
if anybody interested in a demo for current version, we could setup a google hangout to see it. As I said, the current APP is on an internal server at home and I can't offer a public domain access at this point.
Sorry for the long post and thank you all,
Hope all doing well. My name is Kaveh and I'm the owner of TECHNO BRICK store on both BL and BO. I have been a fan and a seller for many years. about 10 years on BL and one of the relatively early adopters of BO. I have a full time job as a Network Engineer and selling Lego is my hobby/second job. I'm also an application developer and have completed several commercial projects during last couple of years with some of my projects being used in some corporations.
To make the story short, for last couple of years, I have been developing a web-based business application which is a focal point in my Lego business. The idea came to mind when I had to manage my inventory over Bl and Ebay. The software has gone through several revisions and is currently used on a daily basis for almost everything that I do on BL and BO. Here are some of the features that I currently have on the software:
1. Purchasing : Creating purchase quote/purchase order/purchase receipt. Automatic creation of SKU for any Lego part, receiving items from PO into your inventory. Cost calculations, account association, shipping/tax aspects of purchasing.
2. Sales: creating sales quote/sales order /sales invoice/ invoicing, Pricing, discounting, margin/profit calculations on each sale and shipping/tax aspects of sale
3. Inventory Management : Comprehensive view of your inventory (qty, avg.cost, last cost,reserved qty, allocated qty...), Manual SKU creation, item location, replenishment, etc
4. Part out : Set catalog, Set cost analysis, part cost calculation, part out work order creation, automatic addition of parts and costs to inventory.
5. Kits, Kit creation, kit cost analysis, kit work order creation and automatic subtraction of parts from the inventory
6. Store Manager-Inventory : Individual BL and BO store inventory management & pricing, qty on order, qty in store, markup.... Price comparison, (competition view), synchronization through API (can synchronize your inventory with both BL,BO)
7.Store Manager - Orders : local download of all orders through API and conversion to final Sales order.
8.Accounting : Keep track of purchasing, sales, shipping costs, charges, discounts, business fees, bank accounts, transfers,...balance sheet..etc
9. Reports : various reports such as weekly, monthly, yearly sales, part count sales, order count ... etc. Also, some analysis regarding best selling products and inventory level, etc...
10. Database management :various setting and definition for the software, such as master catalogs, accounts, etc..
I know, that was too much as an introduction. #:-S . Now, call me crazy but I have a passion for this type of things and it has been working for me
. Now, the question is that if any other seller care about having such an app and how much dose it worth to them. The point is that, this app (although very polished now) requires lot of work if I wanted to invest my time into it to move it to public domain. After API offering by both BL and BO the game has changes a lot and now it's much more secure and open to pull/push data.
I also have many other ideas for future such as integration with Paypal, Ebay, Amazon, etc... But it really all depends on potential of such an app.
So, I need your feedback, Let me know what you think. I'm specially interested to know the sellers with large inventory. All comments are welcome though. If I do such a thing one day, it will be offered to all users. Not Free, but at a reasonable cost.
if anybody interested in a demo for current version, we could setup a google hangout to see it. As I said, the current APP is on an internal server at home and I can't offer a public domain access at this point.
Sorry for the long post and thank you all,
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Yes, I saw many comments here on BrickSync. looks pretty good to me but I never used it myself. Now, in my app everything is integrated in one application. You have a clean GUI that you use to see and manage almost everything including your inventory. Then just one click "Synchronize" your local database to BL/BO. There is no such thing as playing with files. All data is in database and in structured tables. I agree that API is not perfect but there has been many improvements. Now, for audit/debug, I use two methods. first, I use the API feedback, means that for each request you will get a reply which shows the status of reply, success, failure ,error.. The second method is a back-end check, meaning that you look at the overall results and compare it to what you have online. So for example, I upload some parts, the app comes back with a successful notice if it goes through, next, I will do a total check on Inventory Count, lot count and total value of inventory.(if you look at BL/BO) they both provide these aggregate value. Or another example, when an order is downloaded, you see the total lot, quantity and subtotal per order which could be matched with what API order request returns. I hope that I'm clear. Using this method I only have seen inventory discrepancy 2 times(out of thousands of synchronizations) that I have done and there were specific reasons for them . To overcome that, I did some code to compare all items in DB local and online by downloading an XML version of online data.Then I can pinpoint the discrepancy. So, just like any other API, it never can be perfect but I have been using it for last 2-3 years with no issue. If an API gives you a reliability of over 99.9% then there is always a space for being creative and catch a inconsistency here an there.
What's is worthed? Dunno, it all depends on the reliability, the provided features as a whole, speedness and overal functionality, and that can only be 'discovered' with a beta version. The 'value' of such a program most likely depends on the overal 'gain' (time mainly), using BS I know what kind of time I gained, but I can somehow estimate it's value (And I'm failry sure it won't remain 'Free' forever either).
Cheers, Eric
I like both and they are working great. But this does not mean that there is no room for improvements.
When you are really serious about offering your software it would be great to make its possibilities a little more visual. A few screenshots from the major features with a little explanation or even a short youtube video pointing out its benefits could be great. I'm sure that then especially the more experienced sellers could give you feedback if its worth your time and effort to make it a sellable product.
When everything looks good I would probably test it. When everything works smooth i see no reason why not to pay for it.
bw Andy
Michael
I completely agree with your comment regarding value proposition. I just wanted to start the discussion and see if anybody cares or if anybody see a gap for such an app.
@Andys Brickstore Hi Andy, You are right. It's not easy to judge without seeing it. I was actually thinking about posting a Video on YouTube and going over what is it all about. I'm gonna do it and post a video to show everybody what It is now and what I can offer. Thanks for your valuable input.
@CamsCreations Hi Michael, Thanks for your feedback. It's good to know about what you currently use and you may be interested in the app.
@All, appreciate your time and feedback. As I said, I will put together a video and post the link here in next couple of days.
Please don't hesitate to comment or ask questions.
It's interesting, I'm also curious what the level of interest would be. Note that there may be competition/overlap for several of the features above... but I'll post about BrickSync's big brother in a different thread, to avoid potentially derailing/confusing this one.
A little word of caution: if you were thinking of your server handling people's synchronization needs through the APIs, it's likely the IP will get banned by BL (and probably BO?) for hammering the server(s). And there's some ambiguous statement in the BL API terms of service about "sharing data with a third party" that might be problematic.
Cool stuff!
yes. Isn't that crazy ? LOL
You have done a great job and it looks like that it has been well received by community. I just saw your new post and the screenshot looks pretty cool.
Yes, I see some overlap, but I think some competition is good, though I have not released anything yet.
And you are right, one of the major concerns is how BL/BO will deal with such a software. In reality, most of the well developed APIs actually helps in reducing the server load. For example when you try to see an order and process it, you have to load several pages (several clicks) which each means a request. In an API, you make one request for multiple orders and one reply would be returned. So, most of times(Not always) APIs are more efficient than browsing server pages.
Again, it really depends on how BL and BO admins see it. And there are also some risk involved if they decide to stop providing API service. I can rely on Amazon API forever, the whole business and support is behind it. But for BL/BO not so sure. The only thing that I can rely at this point is that they have been cool with it so far. Even before API, we had Brickstore which was pulling data.
Regarding the sharing of information service terms, again, your are right. There are some gray area but other website such as Rebrickable or Brickset are using the data. I'm glad that you brought up this points because these are part of the project that I'm concerned about too. At the end of the day, it all depends on how an app is received by community. I still see BL/BO as a community markets. So there should be some flexibility from admins.
As for BL... Well, the bugs I report are sometimes fixed 6-24 months later. Sometimes.
I welcome both competition and cooperation!
I agree, Lawrence has been amazing in supporting users. For BL, we just have to live with it, LOL.
Looks cool to me, lets see how it goes.
I have created some videos which describes my app (lets call it BrickPortal for now
BrickPortal- Part 1- Intro, Purchasing, Sales
BrickPortal- Part 2- Inventory management
BrickPortal- Part 3- Part out/in, Store Manager, Reports, etc..
Please let me know what you think. We can discuss here, on YouTube or just send me message using YouTube channel.
Thanks all.
But i have four questions :
1) could the currency be set to euro
2) Can i creed my own "print order" template
3) Can the software make a daily backup of everything
4) when importing a BO or BL order, can the software ad an other order number. I like te give every order an order number like 001-2016, 002-2016, 003-2016 and so on.
Thanks for your feedback.
This Software is not available to public yet. The idea is to have a feedback from users to see if it may work for them or not. Then if yes, there would be a development period to move it to internet for public access.
Answer to your questions:
1. At this point only US dollars are supported, but if software offered to public, all major currencies will be supported.
2.It comes with a standard Print order template. no customization at this point.
3.Backup is taken from database in the background. There will be no need for user intervention.
4.Currently every order gets a unique order ID, but not in the format that you have mentioned.
Hope it helps. And thanks for your feedback.
Currently the synchronization is manual. But it could be automated in the future. Basically synchronization can be implemented easily in the form of a script inside a Cron job. There are some other ways including push method meaning that once an order has placed, the server(BL/BO) will push a notification to client (our app). Currently BL supports that but a little bit complex with no documentation. This area is a challenge since we are not sure how BL/BO will deal with a continues API request from the same server (our AP).More on that later.
There are many ways of creating a new SKU.
1. When you create a Purchase Order with new items in it.(automatically created)
2. When you part out (automatically created)
3. Manual creation of a SKU (not shown in the video, it's part of Inventory Management)
Thanks
@technobrick what is the status ?
I really need something that is simple to use, I tried brick packer but could never get it to work. Bricksync looks great but due to an occasional internet glitch in service I am reluctant to use it it - and I can't get my head around the hosted server idea.
So I need something with a good and easy to understand GUI. I have no clue about API matters, nor web design.
At the moment I am considering a departure from part selling, possibly completely apart from LEGO, It really isn't as profitable as I would wish, however if there was something like this available that may change my mind, as it would (I assume) increase sales and profitability