A good deal of our work is awkward jobs that nobody else will take on: problems somebody else has already said no to. They do not fit a plugin, they are too specific for an off-the-shelf answer, and they are costing somebody hours every week. Those are the jobs we like.
Turning a supplier spreadsheet into products
This is the most common one by a distance. A supplier sends a spreadsheet — their format, their column names, their idea of what a product code is — and somebody in the business spends a day a month turning it into listings by hand.
It does not need to be done by hand. We write the thing that reads their file and produces your products, with your categories, your pricing rules and your images, and it runs whenever a new file lands. The day a month goes away and stays away.
Search that actually narrows things down
If you sell anything with specifications — sizes, fittings, voltages, materials, compatibility — a search box that matches words is not much use. What people need is to drill down: pick a property, see what is left, pick another.
Done properly this is the difference between a customer finding the one part that fits and a customer ringing you to ask, or giving up. It takes thinking about how your products actually differ from one another, which is why generic search plugins rarely manage it.
Feeds, in and out
Stock levels going out to a marketplace. Orders coming back in. Price files from a distributor. A feed to buyers so they see what is new without being emailed. None of it is glamorous and all of it is the kind of thing that quietly eats a morning a week until somebody automates it.
The things that should look after themselves
- Sitemaps that update themselves as the catalogue changes, rather than being regenerated when somebody remembers
- Feeds to marketplaces, comparison sites and distributors
- Stock synchronising between a shop and wherever else you sell
- Alerts when something goes wrong, rather than a customer telling you
- Reports that arrive in an inbox instead of waiting to be run
The awkward jobs nobody else will take: how to tell if it is worth doing
The rule of thumb is simple. If somebody in the business does the same fiddly thing more than once a month, and it takes more than an hour, it is probably worth automating and it probably costs less than you think. The job usually pays for itself inside a year and then carries on paying.
Tell us what the awkward thing is. If it can be done we will say how, and if it genuinely cannot we will say that instead.
