This week, “M.” in Fond du Lac, WI, writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
Just as gas stations do, I calculate my items’ prices to 3 decimal places. However, most shopping engines only want 2 decimal places. What should I do?

M. is right; most shopping engines want prices with exactly two digits to the right of the decimal point—no more, no less. They also usually don’t want a currency symbol. The FORMATCURRENCY function will (surprise) remove the currency symbol and fix the number of digits to the right of the decimal point. Here’s how you might write the rule: FORMATCURRENCY($ITEMBINPRICE), and here are some example results (for a US customer; for a European customer, the currency symbol and separator characters would of course be different):

A couple of things to note:

• As examples #1 and #2 show, the function rounds to the nearest penny (0.009 becomes 0.01).
• As example #3 shows, the function will add trailing zeros to “fill out” to exactly 2 decimal places.
• As examples #4 and #5 show, the function will remove any commas. In fact, the commas are completely ignored.
• As example #6 shows, the function will remove the currency symbol.

Now here’s the really cool part: just as I mentioned in last week’s post, for most default templates, we already have a rule in place that will format the prices properly. So, once again, M., the answer is: we already did it for you.

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Earlier this year we introduced the concept of labels to ChannelAdvisor Complete. In our current implementation, labels are a way to dynamically group inventory items together. But why did we choose to do this? Why is this useful?

You might hear labels referred to as tags on other web destinations. Sites like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Gmail popularized their use as a flexible way to organize information. They are short, free text descriptors that you assign to a piece of information so you can group it together with other similar data. For instance on Flickr you can label all your photos of your kid’s soccer games with “soccer” and search on that keyword later to find them all. Or you can have Gmail automatically label your incoming e-mails from specific people with “Chicago” to find messages from all of your friends who live there.

Currently labels in ChannelAdvisor are used to group inventory items together. You can use labels to tag your items as “clearance” for example. Or you can label a set of inventory as “holiday” items. Or you can mark some inventory as both “clearance” and “holiday” - you can assign as many labels as you like to an item!

Once you have labels on inventory, you can filter it by label in the All Items view. This enables you to segment your inventory and operate on just that subset of your items.

So why use labels when you can just group inventory together with ChannelAdvisor’s classifications? For one thing, an item can only belong to one classification at a time. Classifications are good for a general category such as “men’s boots”. But if you want to segment your inventory as clearance items across many classifications (say, “men’s boots” and “women’s boots”) you are better off using a clearance label to accomplish this.
(more…)

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This week, “P.” in Meridian, MS, writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
Most of the time the shipping price data in my inventory contains an actual price, but sometimes it has text, such as “See Site.” However, some shopping providers only accept numeric values for shipping. Can I write a rule that turn these non-numeric values into blanks?

Good news for P: there’s a boolean function called ISNUMERIC, that returns “true” if its input is a number, and “false” otherwise. That means he could create the following rule:

IF(ISNUMERIC($shippingprice),$shippingprice,"")

and then assign that rule to the shipping field in the appropriate templates. Of course, most of our default templates already have a shipping-price formatting rule that does this where appropriate, so the real answer to P’s question is: you don’t have to; we already did it for you! But that wouldn’t be as much fun for you guys to read about, would it?

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The eCommerce world is coming together next week at the Shop.org 2007 Summit in Las Vegas (Vegas, baby!) and of course ChannelAdvisor will be present with a team to showcase our ChannelAdvisor Complete solution (they’ll have some cool goodies, too!).

Here’s where to catch CA @ Shop.org:

• Michael Jones is kicking off a panel discussion on “Merchandising for Conversion” with Wendy Dawson from Fed Ex Services discussing the results of her recent case study titled “Online Consumer Shopping Experience”. Also on the panel will be representatives from JCPenney and Borders sharing their best practices for driving conversions.

• Rob “There’s No Retailer I Can’t Help” Walter is doing an “ask the expert” session on Wednesday titled “Solving the Challenge of Merchandising Your Products on Comparison Shopping Engines” at 2:30.

And if you’re a ChannelAdvisor customer I strongly encourage you to pick up the phone and call your account manager about our secret party during the conference … Hurry, space is limited (I’ll pay $1 for every cool photo from the event!).

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This week, L. in “Woostah,” MA, writes:

Dear Feed Doctor,
Can I write a business rule that does one thing when used in a template for one shopping provider, but does something completely different for all the rest?

You sure can. It’s unlikely you’d ever need to, since you can create different rules for each provider, but it’s good to know you could if you had to.

GETCONTEXTVALUE
There’s a special function called GETCONTEXTVALUE that will return different output depending on how your account is setup, which provider your feed is for, or even the number of items currently processed. For convenience, let’s call these, oh, “context values.” GETCONTEXTVALUE has only one parameter: the name of the context value you want. Here are some particularly useful ones:

• CurrencyCode. This value depends on your account setup. For US accounts, the return value is “USD.”
• CurrentExportCount. This is the number of items that have been successfully added to the output feed. The return value is 0 for the first item (because there aren’t any in the feed yet, see?), 1 for the second, and so on.
• SiteCode. This is a text value that identifies the shopping provider that the output feed is destined for. Usually it’s just the name of the provider as we show it in our UI, but with certain characters, such as spaces, removed

So how would you use these? Well, as it turns out, some of our default templates use the first two. Some providers require the currency code in their feeds, and some want the feed’s total item count in either the header or footer; calling GETCONTEXTVALUE("CurrentExportCount") at the end of processing will return this, so we create these headers and footers last. You could also use GETCONTEXTVALUE("CurrentExportCount") in the item part of the template if you needed to do something like give each item a unique number, or you could write a filter that limited your feed to the first 100 items, etc. And finally, here’s the answer to L’s question:
IF(GETCONTEXTVALUE("SiteCode")="SomeProvider","Do One Thing","Do Another")

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