Outline Roadmap For 1H2017

by mgimena | Jan 1, 2017 | Roadmap

Here’s a bit of a roadmap for the 1st Half of 2017.

We intend to spend a good month cleaning up and implementing the following functionality:

Already Developed But Awaiting Quality Assurance

• Dramatically improved, intelligent versions of bulk COGS / Product Settings / OOE download and uploads
• Managing Max Order Quantities
• Role-based access permissions: Guest account segregation by marketplace and within marketplace, by screen
• See filter context without needing to access filter pane
• Add a product group, brand selector to both the Overall and Product Dashboard
• New overall Widget: Average Customer Lifetime Value
• Product Inventory: Reorder Quantity Calculation Enhancements
• Send SellerLegend subscriptions EU VAT invoices
• Two-Factor authentication login
• Save/Edit multiple user-customized views of any dashboard
• Interactive guided setup.
• Add a column to orders table to record order was refunded and date of refund
• Add the ability to assign custom nicknames to promo codes
• Ability to select multiple products at a time and assign Product Groups, Tags and other product specific settings to all of the selected products
• Allow a variable number of custom-defined fields on both orders and customers

Pipeline Improvements (resources assigned but development not yet started)

• Notifications: Excessive quantity ordered (when product order qty exceeds a preset value per product)
• Notifications: Out of pattern sales velocity
• Notifications: Amazon Settlement Transfer failed
• Notifications: Listing quality issues
• Notifications: Suppressed Listings
• Watchlist: Report on number of instances when customer hit the watchlist for the specific reason, with date of the last hit
• Product Dashboard: facility to enter a parent ASIN and obtain an aggregate dashboard of all the child ASINS
• Inventory: Storage Fee Calculator and Long Term Storage Fees Manager
• Convert FBM orders into multiple FBA orders
• In VAT Settings, add a date of registration. Do not calculate VAT for orders passed before the VAT registration date
• Additional Listing Changes functionality for split testing
• When customer refunds, add an automated customer note. Add the promo code if one was used, with text .
• When Order Item returned, add customer note with text ‘ASIN/SKU/Internal name returned by customer, ‘ [detailed_disposition], [reason], [status]
• In Inventory, add Get Inbound Guidance data
• Show an aggregate EU dashboard

New Features And Directions

• We have a long-standing commitment to developing an interface to the Nimble CRM. This is a sponsored development (meaning someone is providing us with the facilities for us to test it). As such, this will be the first ‘adaptor’ from SellerLegend to an external service. We intend to develop adaptors to popular 3rd party systems throughout 2017. Adaptors will be priced independently on top of the SellerLegend standard subscription.
• Talking about subscriptions, we will be soon be migrating from a single subscription fee to a subscription scheme based on numbers of orders per month and length of retained sales history. The single subscription fee does not allow us to adequately scale our offering. Indeed, we have a great number of sellers with well over 30,000 orders a month and 5-7 years of history, who are causing us to upgrade our servers to keep up with them. This is obviously not sustainable long term. Once the new subscription scheme is implemented, we will be moving from the wait-list model (join-by-invitation-only) to an immediate access model.

So, sometime by mid-February, we will again be able to focus on the more interesting features:

• PPC is again top of the list. This had to be delayed as the seller talent pool who were to assist us in the feature design were just too busy during the 4th quarter to pay any attention to us. In hindsight, we should have been able to predict this would be the case. What were we thinking … ?
• Another candidate feature for mid-Feb onwards is the Reimbursements Assistant (claiming for lost inventory, FC damaged inventory, returned inventory which is not for resale).
• We also have lots of ideas about some very cool inventory management and prediction features.
• We have lost interest in developing an email system. This is because we see a distinct possibility that Amazon will curtail the ability to communicate at will with your customer. So we will be sitting on the fence on that one and revisit in about 6 months time.

Looking into the near future, we can predict there will be a trend towards external PPC solutions and integration of 3rd party platforms and marketplaces, multi-channel fulfillment and the like, as sellers realize it is time to divest and build an e-commerce business rather than just be selling on Amazon. So, we’ll start analyzing what that means for us in the new year. If you have any suggestions we will be delighted to listen to you!

And we are constantly involved in capacity planning and performance enhancements to make sure that your response times are reasonable. We know performance is not stellar and we are unhappy about that. We will need to adopt a segregation strategy for high-volume accounts so that common mortal sellers enjoy a lot more breathing space.

So there you have it. A lot to do as we grow this baby into a respectable adolescent. I probably have left out a few things that you may have been expecting, but I have no doubt you will remind me if that is the case.