Suppose you have a group of items you think will sell better together, like a SHOP THIS LOOK deal.   Maybe, you have a hat, scarf and gloves that all look great together and you want to offer them to your customers as a group.  They get a great look; you sell more items.

Luckily, QuickBooks accounting supports the creation of an item with a product type of ‘Grouped.’ One may then associate multiple child products, with individual quantities, to the grouped parent item. Thus, when the individual parent is selected on the QuickBooks invoice, like all of the associated child items are automatically added to the order. This feature of QuickBooks has been a tremendous time-saver for organizations utilizing such marketing-oriented groupings.

“When customers come to our site, they typically buy more than one item.  As an on-line retailer, I need to make sure I make it easy for them to add more items,”   says Lisa Foster, who runs two eCommerce carts, www.1bagatatime.com and www.snapsac.com.

The problem for Foster, and many online vendors, is that her accounting and shopping cart capabilities were out-of-sync.  Her Magento cart wasn’t configured to offer group items,, so keeping track of inventory, getting accurate data on what was paid for what, offering a group deal to encourage more spending, became messy.  The Magento eCommerce platform natively supports the concept ‘grouping’ to improve the customers’ buying experience, but carts of lesser complexity (and there are many) may never offer such functionality.
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Or…conversely titled as ‘The Consequences of Misrepresenting Your Inventory Online’

Last Christmas my wife and I decided to give ourselves a significantly upgraded digital camera from what we currently had. We shopped online and we shopped early, just to make sure that we could use the first present opened to capture the rest of the day’s events. We found a site that offered a great price and confidently ‘pulled the trigger’ on our purchase. Then we waited…and waited…and waited some more. We waited three days past the expected delivery date before making an inquiry. We were informed that the model we had ordered was on “back-order.” Well, it wasn’t on ‘back-order’ when we ordered it! What happened between the time the site indicated ‘In Stock’ and the time we confirmed our purchase?!

The answer to such questions can lie anywhere between unscrupulous business ethics and unintentional gaps in business process. Regardless of the reason, we were absolutely livid. A little better due-diligence on our part would have served us well. It was easy to find a bevy of identical consumer complaints against the same company we had purchased from. It is, unfortunately, a circumstance that happens far too often to trusting online consumers. Just take a trip out to > www.PissedConsumer.com and search the term “website out of stock” to see the vitriol levied against offending merchants. Whether by accident, or by bad design, as an online merchant, you can’t afford to have a permanent record on any such site.
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