It is nice to break up stock into different categories. It helps to get a feel how birthday cards sell compared to your wedding cards similarly it is good to know how your sales of fine points compared to your medium point pens are doing.
Say a supplier of stationery rings up. The conversation might go like this.
Supplier: Hello I would like to talk to you about the category field in the standard stock import file.
POS: What do you want to know?
Supplier: Some newsagents have asked us to put in categories into the stock.
POS: Okay
Supplier: What do we put in the category field?
POS: Well your categories but remember that they must be two characters or fewer.
Supplier: We don’t have this range classified but we can put anything you like in there.
POS: ?????????
The problem is there is nothing we can say at this point as except in magazines, no industry standard exists.
Now why not? It is not a big job. I don’t think we would need the suppliers as most of them are more then pleased to follow an industry standard.
Say we say there are about ten top departments for newsagents without magazines.
Say every department in the Newsagency would break down into about eight families, then each family is broken down into about five categories. So we have about forty categories per department. In practice, many more get confusing.
This could not be done in a month if the will was there!
We could probably go even faster by using a proven system, for example office supplies are all nicely categorized in
www.AMAZON.COM
Why not use that as a model to start us off?
