Supporting business processes

We’ve recently been working on a new piece of support software for one of our clients.  They run a large e-commerce shop which sells a significant quantity of product bundles – these are collections of products (sold singly) combined into a single product.  This makes it easy for customers to buy several related products at the same time with a single click – examples might be trousers and a belt, or printer ink and paper.  Selling products collectively in a bundle also allows you to set a special price for the bundle – further incentivising sales in your store.

Our e-commerce engine of choice, WooCommerce, allows shop managers to record values for cost of goods against products.  This helps to calculate profit margins.

However – if the cost of goods for a product included in a product bundle changes, the cost of goods for the bundle itself doesn’t change, and nor does the selling price.  Over time, as the cost of obtaining the components of the bundle change, the price of the bundle should rise accordingly in line with the required profit margins. 

This doesn’t happen automatically.

And for a shop selling hundreds of bundles, it would be an impossibly time-consuming job to edit these bundles each time costs rise.

Business analysis

At Pink Fish, we’re not just web designers – we like to really get to know your business and try to think up ways in which we can use technology to save you time (and money).  We like to look at your real-world business processes and find the time-consuming jobs which we can help automate or places where we can add value.

In this instance, we were asked by our client to look at developing some sort of bundle-editing tool – a piece of software which would show the selling prices of all bundles, the combined cost of goods of the bundle components, the cost of goods as recorded on the bundle, the percentage profit margin and the difference between what the actual cost of goods (of the components) were and the cost of goods of the bundle.

Add in some filters to show high or low profit margins (to help identify problem areas) and a few functions to bulk update the cost of goods or selling prices across the bundles and you’re good to go.

Now our client has a powerful tool that gives them far greater oversight of their costs and profit margins.  It allows them to make bulk changes to many products at the same time, ensuring that prices rise inline with costs of goods, preserving profitability and margins.

It has made a huge difference to their business.

Future developments

We’re currently working on a large back-office support system for another of our clients which is aimed at reducing the admin workload of support staff in processing, picking, packing and delivering orders.

If you think your business could benefit from additional support software, or you find yourself spending time on repetitive, manual tasks then do please get in touch with us – we’d be delighted to see how we can help.