Product Family limitations
Saving product family information naturally overwrites the information in the products within the sets. However, there are instances when variants (members of the family) may have different settings. For example, one variant is a pendant, the other is for a pendant with a necklace; here the Short Description varies but saving the product family overwrites the Short Description in each product. This gets more serious when Drop-ship supplier or COGS accounts are changed. For example, while digital sales are very poorly implemented in DEAR, there should be some way of managing the sale of a Book and the same eBook. These are variants of the same product that have different Drop-ship suppliers and different Revenue and COGS accounts.
An easy solution to this is to recognise that variants may have different settings, and when they are different that DEAR display the field as "<multiple settings>" in grey. When the Family is saved, fields that remain greyed are not saved within the individual products, thus providing some safety.
One other point, is that Discounts are often assigned per Family not just per product, but the ability to assign Discounts to Families is absent. For example, if a wholesale customer is tagged, then you may wish to apply a discount to all variants of a shirt to the wholesale customer. Currently, this needs to be done per-product, or export and import a discount matrix.
We've ended up exporting the product list (in it's entirety - as you can't even export a filtered list) and we make the changes in excel and then re-import the products we've updated. This is extremely frustrating and relies on everyone in the company having a good understanding of excel. Kind of defeats the object of having an inventory management system to some degree, if you're constantly exporting and importing data to work around it's limitations.
@Angelo Li
@Nicolas Noakes
Or just use Google Sheets for import/export. It's much more user friendly (in my opinion), and it's free.
When importing your .csv file just un tick the 'Convert text to numbers, dates, formulas' to avoid it stripping any zeros from the front of numbers or doing anything weird to your formatting. Have never had any issues with UPC field.
It seems DEAR have yet to solve the minimum before reorder and reorder quantity issue when we update a product family.
How do you overcome this when updating the product family?
Can DEAR solve this NOW? It has been years.
Hi Tricia. We tend to just export products and then do the updating via Excel. It's a real shame that Dear hasn't found a fix for this.
I do actually wonder if anyone from Dear/Cin7 Core reviews these Feature Requests.
Hi Graham,
Thank you for responding. Will have to work this way until Dear fix it. Wonder the same as this problem has been there for ages.
Hi Graham/Tricia, I think that is the only way around this issue currently, clunky as it is. I fortunately don't have to do that many family product updates, as our product parameters remain quite stable in the drinks trade but nevertheless, it is very time consuming when you do have to make these changes. I am very wary of using the Excel import utilities provided by Cin7 Core as I have witnessed a few random errors when performing some bulk updates.
B2B has all the hallmarks of an MVP development, developed just enough to make it useable but with no real intention to take the functionality into the really useful bracket. It's not part of their core offering and therefore they will not invest much more money into into it IMHO - just enough to fix high priority issues and the occasional small functional enhancement. My own personal gripe is the sheer lack of MI reporting capability to be able to track how well B2B sales are performing. All they need to do is add the field sales channel to the existing reports - but that seems far too much trouble for them to implement after I raised it with them. Just the normal response of "please raise a feature request".
Unless they invest more in these other applications and add function and capability and fix errors/design floors (which they also find hard to accept!) then what will happen is users will only put up with it for so long and then migrate to a much more functionally rich alternative. For example, Woo-commerce, which also integrates with Cin7 Core. I can envisage our company going that way within the next 18 months.
But we live in hope....
Maybe a more straightforward solution would be for Dear to simply remove any potentially unique values from the Product Family Options.
I think the most frustrating thing at the moment is it's really unclear how much attention Dear pays to the Feature Requests and customer pain points. To me some of the issues are really basic functionality (not specific use cases). However, from what I've seen of the developments Dear have made, they seem much more focussed on the manufacturing elements of the system and to some degree their own POS functionality.