27 February 2007

How do you get your sales information?

How do you get your sales information? There's a web version accessable from SL's website, and a way to access it from inside the client software. The latter's going away. But the web version of the information has been having update problems since at least last month. LL is claiming that the hardware changes they're making will end the data update problems. Since they're removing the alternate means of checking that information at the same time they're doing this, if it doesn't work there aren't a lot of alternatives left for being informed quickly of sales information.

I expect if this doesn't work quickly and well, there's going to be a lot more vendors using IM and email services in the hopes that something gets thru. I've already had a sale where the data was posted without the name of the item sold - fortunately it was something with a distinctive price and the customer seems content. Tapping an outside server with HTTP might be a better bet; the grid's had reliability issues with IMs and email in the past.

I'm tempted to go with the HTTP method... it'd be really convenient to have all my sales information ready for reports without any effort on my part. Currently I just import from SL or SLExchange, although some of my vendors IM/email me more details than I'd get from SL's reporting.

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