by Usama Ahmad | Dec 15, 2017 | News & Events
We at SellerLegend have a big dilemma.
To video or to not video.
Sounds like a simple decision, right? Of course, the answer is to video, surely.
Well, we have several challenges with videoing, which we explain in our knowledgebase like so:
https://docs.sellerlegend.com/…/why-is-there-no-video-trai…/
This is all well and good, but life would be soo much better with videos, wouldn’t it?
Well, here’s a test of a potential mid-way solution which provides us with the agility we need to maintain visual training material, and we would welcome your input.
The tool we use essentially strings together screen prints and commentary and provides a step up from written documentation. But regrettably is not as good as motion video.
So, we’d like your input on the matter. Here’s our first non-video for you to judge.
The tool I mentioned is still in its infancy and does not yet support 16:9 aspect ratio, which is a pain. You’d really want to see the screen prints in … well … full screen. However, we’re assured that that is coming in 1Q18. So we’ll patiently wait.
We have produced a version narrated in English, German, French, and Spanish.
Please let us know whether it is worth us investing in what will essentially result in A LOT of time producing stuff like this.
http://vid.sellerlegend.com/l/e04ojlh7ur-vixue2dgm9
by Usama Ahmad | Dec 13, 2017 | News & Events
Due to our business growth, we are looking for two additional experienced Senior Developers and one Customer Support Analyst.
If you are a Senior Developer and
– Are well-versed in the Amazon MWS and Product Advertising APIs,
– Are an expert on the Amazon Cloud Computing infrastructure (EC2, RDS, AWS, S3, SQS),
– Have a solid foundation in PHP/Laravel,
– Understand machine learning and AI,
– Are a team player, used to work in an international environment where timezones usually work against you
– Can work remotely in a small group of 7 using the industry standard collaborative tools (Slack, Trello, Github and many others)
If you are a Customer Support person and
– Have experience working in a customer-facing role
– Are resourceful, having attention to detail and a readiness to dive headfirst into user issues
– Have genuine curiosity about why things happen and how to fix them, and love getting to the bottom of things
– Have a passion for making sure the customer gets what they need
– Can show demonstrable problem-solving skills, with the ability quickly understand the root of an issue and map out steps to be taken to resolve it
– Can show demonstrable writing skills, with a focus on modifying your tone based on the context (customer’s happiness level, the urgency of the situation, etc.)
– With preferably previous experience with support handing in a startup environment – doing tech support for a product like SellerLegend is very different from working for a run of the mill call centre
Then please get in touch with us at support@sellerlegend.com referencing this post
by Usama Ahmad | Dec 12, 2017 | New Features
You probably have noticed by now.
We suck at graphic design 
We pride ourselves on having outstanding capabilities when it comes to devising and developing complex functions. However, exquisite UI designs and UI colour co-ordination…?
Nah, that’s not us :
As you may know, we have private label versions of SellerLegend. And some of our private labellers have spent time and effort finessing the look and feel of their SellerLegend versions.
And I must say that when we compare our colour palettes against our white labellers’, we are ashamed of ourselves.
As we cannot legally copy our white labellers’ designs and just paste them into your version of SellerLegend, we decided to outsource the design work to you guys.
If the colour scheme of the app is important to you and the current colour scheme makes you feel ill every time you look at it (sorry), you now can paint the dashboards whichever way you like.
Notice the dashboard tiles have grown a colour eyedropper icon next to the calendar icon, this allows you to choose the dual-tone colour of each tile.
Each of the items on the Dashboard chart legend also has such an eyedropper, and with it, you can change the colour of every constituent part of the daily KPI bars.
If you think this feature was a waste of development time we could have better applied to more useful features, think again.
As we grow more successful in the WL part of our business, customizing the colour palettes to our white labellers’ specification was taking too much of our time. Now they can do it themselves too, without our assistance.
by Usama Ahmad | Dec 7, 2017 | News & Events
A few weeks ago, we committed we would be providing a feature to account for monthly storage fees per ASIN.
We have now started developing this and we have hit a bit of a snag.
The storage fee reports come with an ASIN and an FNSKU alongside the storage charges for one month. So, we can certainly provide a breakdown per ASIN, but when it comes to assigning the cost to a product for product profitability calculations, we need to assign it to an SKU rather than an ASIN.
See the issue?
We can certainly convert the FNSKU to an SKU, that is not a problem. However, in the cases where there is no FNSKU, we are stuck.
Cases with no FNSKU include comingled inventory and inventory where the UPC or EAN numbers are used instead.
How would you folks want to address this?
by Usama Ahmad | Dec 7, 2017 | New Features
We have just deployed the period-based VAT for Europe.
This is to accommodate the use cases where:
– A seller is not VAT registered for a period of time when just starting a new business
– A seller has exceeded the VAT threshold, registers for VAT and starts charging VAT from the date of registration
– A seller changes from the Flat VAT Rate Scheme to the Standard VAT Rate Scheme or vice-versa
– A seller falls below the VAT thresholds and ceases to charge VAT
– The tax authorities change their VAT rate (heard the one about Brexit, Y’all?)
Period-based VAT behaves like period-based COGS, whereby a specific VAT rate is applied to the orders received between the two boundary dates specified in the settings.
There is a setting at the level of the marketplace as a whole, but of course, you can also define a period-based VAT rate at an individual product level, which then overrides the marketplace VAT rate.
The marketplace and product level date ranges are independent. This provides the added flexibility be able to assign overlapping date ranges at the product level. In essence, the date ranges at product level trump the date ranges at marketplace level.
by Usama Ahmad | Nov 28, 2017 | New Features
We have a new product widget called Categories and Sales Ranks, which will show you all the categories and subcategories your product is ranked for and display their respective BSRs.
Sales Rank info is also visible on every screen where the BSR was originally appearing, like on the Products -> Products List screen and Sales -> Sales Statistics screen among others
by Usama Ahmad | Nov 28, 2017 | New Features
One of the pet peeves of users selling in multiple Eurozone marketplaces is that they are currently required to enter COGS for each marketplace individually.
It is common-sensical enough if you are selling distinct products for each country, or your COGS vary per marketplace for the same product; it is, however, a bit of a drag if you are carrying the same products for all 4 Euro marketplaces and they all have the same COGS.
We have just deployed a feature which makes this burden more tolerable. As of today, when entering COGS for a Eurozone MP via the user interface, you have the ability to click on a button called +Propagate to Other Marketplaces which will… well, er, propagate the COGS you are editing to your choice of other MPs within the same account.
The same feature is available when you use the bulk upload feature: One spreadsheet upload is now sufficient to populate one/any/all of the 4 Euro MPs within one account.
by Usama Ahmad | Nov 28, 2017 | New Features
Not much more to say on this one…
In the Sales -> Orders screen, click on the Tags cell for any given product and type away.
Comma-delimit your input if you want to add multiple tags at once.
by Usama Ahmad | Nov 28, 2017 | New Features
We were not proud of it. Not one bit. I mean the OOE screen did the job, but it was ugly and impractical, right?
No more. We’ve cleaned it up and turned it into a data table, which allows you to do column sorting, filtering and stuff.
Please go to Settings -> Operating Expenses to admire it!
by Usama Ahmad | Nov 10, 2017 | Roadmap
Well, whaddayaknow …!
It does not happen very often 
, but I’ll admit it, I was wrong. (It often happens I’m wrong, just that I rarely admit to it.)
It’s about the storage fees thingy. I have, for a very long time, maintained that Amazon do not provide us storage fees by ASIN. It turns out they do.
There’s a report we already download for other purposes which contains the storage fees by ASIN. A couple of subscribers kept telling me of that report, and I always dismissed it.
I never denied that the report contained ASINs and that it contained storage fees. But I always said these were not reconcilable with the financial transactions we receive from Amazon, which form the basis of all the financials in SellerLegend. So, I was adamant we would not use this.
Now, thanks to Michael’s tenacity, he forced me (yeah, against my will), to have a second look, and lo and behold, there was light!
The storage fees we receive in Amazon’s financial transactions do not carry an ASIN. That is because they are organized not by ASIN, but by fulfilment centre. And also, the fees are delayed by one month. So September fees are passed in October, for example.
Once you take these two facts into account, (and you disregard the fact the report says the reported storage fees are just an ‘estimate’), the report with the ASINs matches the financial transactions by FC exactly.
What does that mean, you say?
Well, it DOES NOT mean that your profits or fees in SellerLegend will be any different. We always considered the storage fees in settlements and, recently, in the P&L. But we counted the storage fees at the total aggregate level.
But it DOES mean that we will soon be able to assign monthly storage fees to ASINs and therefore save you a load of time calculating this manually. It also means you will be able to have a more precise product profitability.
It also means that you’ll be able to gauge how much an ASIN costs to store in FBA and compare the cost against 3rd party storage solutions.
Now, how we squeeze this in the development cycle is another story. I’ll keep you posted.
