Product Management(III) - Alerts

In a dropshipping business, you are relying on your supplier as far as the product availability is concerned. Since the available stock for each product SKU is highly dynamic in nature, it becomes essential that the product inventory in your store is consistent that with the supplier.

Similarly, the pricing of dropship product can vary on a daily basis and you, as a store owner, do not want to be a in a position where the price of a given product has increased without your knowledge and thereby is negatively impacting your profit margin.

Anstrex Dropship platform has developed an alert feature precisely to address the aforementioned issues. This tool is completely automated and maintains your product inventory and pricing according to your very own personally defined configuration.

Let's review the alerts screen and the information available on this screen.

To get to the alerts screen, you need to click on the Alerts entry on the left hand side bar menu. The following screenshot shows the layout of the alerts screen

Each labelled item in the above screenshot is explained below:

1. Tab Bar: This bar can list one or more tabs, each tab representing a store that is connected to Anstrex platform. If you have only 1 store connected
2. Alert Type Dropdown Filter: This filter allows you to shortlist alerts by the following types
   1. Price Change: Alerts triggered by supplier price change (increase or decrease)
   2. Qty Change: Alerts triggered by Qty change for any SKU of the given product. You can expect daily alerts of this type because quantity of fast moving products is changing on a daily basis
   3. Qty Zero: This is a more special case of Qty Change alert where the inventory drops to zero and you will not be able to order such items from the supplier leading to order cancellation. Although, the item may become available in a few days.
   4. Product Unavailable: In this case the supplier pulls the product from the site and is no longer found on the site. These alerts are extremely critical and therefore we provide a special filter to find such alerts.
3. Action Type Dropdown Filter: This filter allows you to shortlist alerts by the actions that were triggered when the alert was generated. The available options are:
   1. Price Adjusted: This means that price was automatically adjusted in your store by the alerts that are shortlisted by use of this filter.
   2. Product Unpublished: This will shortlist all the alerts where the product was unpublished from your store.
   3. Qty Adjusted: This filter will shortlist all the alerts that led to quantity/inventory changes in your store.
   4. Email Notification: If the alerts triggered an email notification (default action), then these alerts can all be shortlisted by this filter.
   5. No Action: If the alerts did not trigger any actions in your store, they will be displayed by using this filter.
4. Supplier Dropdown Filter: This will allow you to filter alerts by supplier.
5. Date Range Filter: This will allow you to filter alerts within a specified date range. Default date range is last 30 days.
6. Supplier ID Filter: Here you can type a specific supplier ID and it will list all the alerts belonging to the product with that specific ID.
7. Search: This allow you to search alerts by typing a short phrase that will matched to Item Title/Description fields.
8. Button Bar: This bar has following buttons:
   1. Search Button: This button needs to be clicked after you change any filter or specify a search phrase to trigger the search.
   2. Reset Button: This button removes all the filters and sets everything to default value.
9. Collapsible Table: This table shows all the available alerts. The alerts are collapsed into each product to make this table more readable.
10. Plus Icon (➕): Clicking on this icon will uncollapse the table and will allow you view actual alerts belonging to a particular product as explained in the section below.

As noted above, alerts table is collapsible and does not show actual alerts in its default state to keep it readable. Alerts are collapsed under each product and can be viewed by clicking on the ➕ icon in the first column of the table.

Clicking on this icon once will show you the actual alerts for that product as shown in the screenshot below:

As noted in the screenshot above, the alerts themselves are also in a table format with multiple columns as explained below:

1. SKU: SKU ID of the variant belonging to the product.
2. Prev. Price: This is the supplier price value that was detected when the item was checked previous time
3. Cur. Price: This is the supplier price value that was detected last and reflects the current supplier price. This value can have an up arrow (⬆) or a down arrow (⬇) depending on whether the price went up or down from previous values respectively.
4. Prev. Qty: This is the supplier quantity that was detected when item was checked previously.
5. Cur. Qty: This is the supplier quantity that is the most current value. This value can have an up arrow (⬆) or a down arrow (⬇) depending on whether the quantity went up or down from previous values respectively.
6. Alert Msg.: This shows the all the alerts that were triggered due to the change.
7. Actions: This shows the actions (if any) that were taken such as price adjustment in your store, inventory adjustment in your store, unpublishing of the product etc.
8. Date: Date when the alert was generated.

In this article, we reviewed a very important feature of product management which includes automatic inventory control and price adjustments using the Alerts feature of the Anstrex Dropship platform.