The first thing you need to do in AIMsi is setup your active-e settings. This is where you tell AIMsi the URL to your shopping cart, which AIMsi price you want to use on your shopping cart, which customer default to use when new customers are created from shopping cart orders, which shipping method is used when downloading orders from your shopping cart and various other settings.
The next thing you need to do in AIMsi is establish your shopping cart categories. Typically your web categories are going to be different than your existing AIMsi categories. Your web categories can be nested as many levels as needed. For example:
Guitar Accessories
Guitar Effects and Pedals
Guitar Straps
Picks
Here is what the Web Category setup screen looks like.
Once your web categories are established, you can assign specific web categories to your inventory items. Keep in mind that an individual sku can be associated to multiple web categories. There is a program in AIMsi called active-e Inventory. This program makes it really easy to isolate similar skus so that you can assign your web categories to groups of skus very quickly.
This is the minimum that you need to do to get your inventory ready for the shopping cart.
There are additional fields that can be setup for each sku.
Update active-e: This is what tells AIMsi that something has changed on this sku and this sku should be uploaded to the shopping cart the next time you run the upload process.
Un-Publish: This leaves the sku in your website database but the sku cannot be seen on your shopping cart.
Call to Order: This tells the shopping cart that this sku cannot be ordered over the web. Some manufactures do not allow certain product to be sold over the web, but you still want your customers to know that you carry that product.
Free Shipping: This tells the shopping cart that you do not charge shipping on this product.
Matrix Override: This tells the system how you want to handle items that come in different colors or sizes. The shopping cart can display each color size combination as separate skus or show the color and sizes in a drop down list that the customer can select from.
Dimension: The dimensions of the product.
Restricted Qtys: If this product can only be sold in increments of 5 you would enter 5,10,15,20,25. The shopping cart will make the customer select an quantity increment level.
Related Products: You can enter a list of skus that can show when a customer is viewing this item on the shopping cart. The shopping cart makes it very simple for the customer to purchase these additional items.
Upsell Products: You can enter a list of up sell skus that is shown when a customer is viewing this item on the shopping cart.
Requires Products: If this item requires the purchase of another item(s) you can enter them here. The shopping cart will force the customer to purchase these additional items with the purchase this sku.
Sales Prompt ID: In your shopping cart you can setup your sales price prompts. (i.e. Special Price, Blow Out, Introductory Price) This allows you to assign a particular sales price prompt to this sku.
Web Category: These are the categories this product can be found under on the shopping cart. You can select multiple categories per sku.
Description: This is the long description that describes this product. This is where you would add your detailed product description with the specifications etc. This description can be HTML based. If you right click in the description you will have an option to bring up an HTML editor so that you can format your product descriptions to be nice looking.
Display Product: This button will open up your web browser and bring up this particular sku on your shopping cart.
Master Image: This will display the image that the manufacturer is providing active-e.
Local Image: This will display any image that you associated with this sku.
FTP Image: This will take a local image from your computer and send it to your shopping cart. This will handle the main image as well as 10 additional images per product. The local image will always override any images that the manufacturer provides active-e.
Del FTP Image: This will remove your images from your shopping cart.
eBay: Click here for more information about our active-e eBay interface.
All of these fields can be updated in the inventory maintenance programs or in afore mentioned active-e Inventory program that allows you to update these fields by groups of skus.
Finally, to get your product on your shopping cart you will run the active-e Update Shopping Cart program. This will transmit all the items that have the Update active-e flag checked. This will also transmit your nested web categories and automatically create your manufacture database in your shopping cart.
As you can see, all the inventory management of your shopping cart takes place in AIMsi. With other solutions you have to manage your inventory in your accounting system and also manage your website database. With the active-e solution you are only managing your inventory in one place, in your AIMsi system that you are used to using.