Pre-Deployment Q&A for Lead Commerce
The questions below will assist our on-boarding support teams with setting up Lead Commerce successfully for you. These questions should be reviewed by everyone in your company to ensure that nothing is missed or issues don't arise while in training or just before "Go Live"
| Question | Support Notes | Customer Response |
| What types of products do you want to inventory and sell? | Products can be very different from one another. For example, you could have products that you inventory that you sell as is. You can also have products that you use to create Kits and Bundles. Additionally, you might do light manufacturing where you build a finished product from a bunch of smaller inventory items. | |
| Do you sell items in Bundles? | Sometimes referred to as Kits, Bundles these types of products will deduct inventory based on your Bill of Material (BOM) settings. | |
| Do you manufacture or assemble products? | Different from Kits, these products are inventoried as a finished good with their own Stock levels. | |
| Do any of your products have unlimited inventory? | This would be items like e-books, downloads and possibly products like services where inventory is really not needed. | |
| Where do you acquire your products from? | Lead Commerce tracks the businesses you buy from. They are called Vendors. | |
| How many Vendors do you buy products from? | If you have more than 5 Vendors, you might want to import your Vendors into the software using the Import Vendors utility located in the More Menu in the back office in the Vendors area. | |
| Do you use your own ID numbers for items or do you use a UPC code or would you like Lead Commerce to automatically provide a unique ID for every item you import? | Lead Commerce is capable of creating product and SKU IDs on its own or it can import UNIQUE values as part of your import or product creation. The setting for tis is found in the Default Increments area of Settings. The setting is called "Use Custom SKU ID". | |
| Do you want to start your Order ID, Purchase Order ID and other areas of Lead Commerce at a certain increment? | Some customers are moving from their existing software to Lead Commerce. For example, sometimes it is helpful to set increments far enough apart so you can easily tell if the order is a legacy order or a new one from Lead Commerce. | |
| Are you planning on using Lead Commerce for Order Summary, Pick List, Packing Slips and Purchase Orders? | Lead Commerce provides out-of-the-box templates as part of a standard deployment. If templates need to be changed, you as the customer can pay for these changes directly to Lead Commerce or you can hire a 3rd party to assist you. If you have a person on staff who understands HTML and CSS, then you might be able to make these changes without any assistance. | |
| Do any of your products have images, PDFs or other file types that you would like to load into Lead Commerce? | Lead Commerce allows you to associate images of items, documents like PDFs (i.e. instruction documents, how to's, product specifications, brochures, etc). | |
| Do you have products that can be ordered in different configurations? | Lead Commerce can handle products that can be ordered with different options. For example, you might have products that come in different sizes, color, length, width. Ensure you discuss this with your on-boarding specialist to ensure this is something that should be implemented. | |
| Do you currently track your inventory stock levels? | This is important as this data will need to be imported to your SKUs once you are ready to go live. | |
| Do any of your products have expiration dates, Lot IDs, or do you track your products on a Batching level? | Lead Commerce allows you to track your inventory based on product expiration, manufacturing dates, Lot codes and barcoding. | |
| Do you sell your products at different prices based on who the customer is? | Lead Commerce can handle tiered pricing models. | |
| Do you order products from your Vendors in bulk or in larger volumes that are different than the size you sell to your customers? | Lead Commerce can track your Case Pack values which would be your Vendor SKU IDs as well as automatically converting your inventory levels to your Unit of Measure when receiving inventory on Purchase Orders (PO). | |
| Will you use Lead Commerce to issue Purchase Orders and replenish inventory stock levels? | You can issue POs in Lead Commerce and receive product once your products show up in your warehouse. | |
| How many warehouse locations do you want to track inventory for? | Lead Commerce is a multi-warehouse software system. The software will allow you to track inventory in multiple cities, buildings, retail locations and any physical area where you store your products. | |
| If you have multiple warehouses, do you plan on transferring product from one warehouse to another? | A warehouse transfer allows you to process the removal of stock from the source warehouse and add it to the target warehouse by keeping a unique record of the transfer. | |
| Do you want to track your assembly of products in Lead Commerce? | Lead Commerce allows you to track the process of assembling your items and then adding the finished good to inventory, while deducting the base inventory items used in the manufacturing process. | |
| Do your products that you carry have alternative IDs, legacy ID values or any data that needs to be loaded into Lead Commerce? | You can customize Lead Commerce with Attributes. Attributes are custom interface and database objects that can be added by you to store more data in the software then might be available with out-of-the-box fields. | |
| Do you or your sales team create Quotes as part of your sales process? | Quotes allow you to put a price or proposal together without committing inventory. | |
| How do customers pay you for orders? | Examples would be credit card, cash, check, terms, POs, etc. | |
| Do you charge your customers Sales Tax? | Lead Commerce allows you to set up your Tax Regions at the state and city zip code levels. | |
| Do you ship your products? | Do the products you sell need to be shipped as part of the fulfillment process? | |
| Do you use FedEx? | ||
| Do you use UPS? | ||
| Do you use USPS? | ||
| How do you plan on printing your shipping labels? | Lead Commerce supports both email as well as thermal printing options. Both are emailed to the person fulfilling the orders or when using Bulk Processing. If you plan on using a thermal printer, Lead Commerce only supports Zebra manufactured hardware. An additional software download is required. See support articles on configuring this option. | |
| Do you use any other 3rd party shipping companies? | Examples would be 3PLs, LTL or ay other custom shipping companies that you use to ship product. | |
| Do you plan on using any of the Lead Commerce Integrations such as Shopify, Big Commerce, Amazon, eBay and other 3rd party marketplaces and platforms? | If you are going to connect Lead Commerce to some other channels, you will need to review the support articles section that discusses App Connectors. | |
| Do you sell product on different marketplaces and platforms that have different brand names? | Lead Commerce can customize the templates with different logos, business names so that your packing slips and order confirmations look like the brand name they were ordered on. | |
| Do you want to track your orders under different Sales Channels for reporting purposes? | A Sales Channel in Lead Commerce is the high level way of identifying where the order manifested from. | |
| Do you have any custom fields (Attributes) that you will require on your sales orders? | You will need to determine any additional data fields that you need in your back office. | |
| Do any of these custom fields need to be incorporated into your Order Summary, Pick List, Packing Slip or Invoices? | If this is required, then you should begin building a document mockup with all of the data you would like to see on your different documents. | |
| Do you have different types of customers? | Lead Commerce allows you to track your customer lists based on different price levels, volume discounts, product filtering. | |
| Will you be using Lead Commerce for your sales team and their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) needs? | Lead Commerce can track your customers as either customers or leads. A Lead would be a contact who has never purchased product from you before. A Customer is someone who has at least purchased from you once. | |
| Do your customers have any special data that needs to be imported into Lead Commerce? | This could be old account numbers, current customer ID values and any other data that you would like to add to the Lead Commerce customer interface. | |
| What reports would you like to run in Lead Commerce? | There are three sub areas of reporting in Lead Commerce. You can run reports based on the dimension of customers, orders and the products you sell. Inside each dimension, are sub-level reporting layers that you will build using the Criteria section of the report drill down in the back office. | |
| Do you have automated or scheduled reporting needs? | If you need a certain report to automatically run and deliver the results to you, this will need to be setup using our APIs. There is an additional fee for this type of reporting. | |
| Are you planning on using barcodes to inventory product, receive items and as part of the fulfillment process? | If so, you will need to be licensed for the barcode add-on of Lead Commerce. |
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