Overview #

See also:

• Sales Portal Data Verification—Reviewing your data to ensure correctness.
• Sales Information Access—How to limit who sees what information.
• Sales Territory File—Define names for your territories to make it easier to use.
• Setting up eOL portal Shipment Tracking—Three ways to specify tracking numbers on invoices.

Currencies #

The sales portal supports one currency at a time. However, you may configure what the currency is using the Company Settings "Sales portal currency code" field. E.g. if the values you provide below for "UnitPrice" etc are Euros, then specify EUR in the "Sales portal currency code" Company Setting.

File Requirements #

The eCat Online sales portal requires two files in addition to the files required for the eCat iPad app: order_data.csv and invoice_data.csv. (Filenames are case sensitive.) These files can be uploaded interactively in the admin portal or put in the FTP site /data directory for automated processing.

Order and invoice records have two sections, a header and a list of items. These two sections are combined into one CSV file as follows. The first row for a given order (or invoice) contains the header fields as well as the fields for the first item. Subsequent rows contain the fields for each of the remaining items, and contain nothing for the header fields. The order and invoice files must be sorted so all the lines for a given order or invoice are grouped together. For example:

Subsequent rows (for line items) may repeat the header details for ease of programming (SQL OUTER JOINs will repeat those details). We use the first row of header data we see and ignore subsequent redundant header values.

That is, the following is OK:

Performance #

Import time is a concern because a single company could have millions of rows of imported invoice/order data and thousands of users. Therefore, we employ the following strategy:

• each record (order, invoice) includes a LastModifiedAt timestamp. After an import, the system marks the most recent timestamp and stores it. On subsequent imports, only records with timestamps newer than the LastModifiedAt value will be considered for adding/modifying.
• each record (order, invoice) includes a OrderDate/InvoiceDate. The import process will keep track of the earliest date in the import file. Afterwards, it will delete all records with dates prior to that minimum date.

File Specification #

order_data.csv File Specifications #

(click here to download a sample order_data.csv file)

invoice_data.csv File Specifications #

(click here to download a sample invoice_data.csv file)

Automatic summary sales data file generation #

A summary data file named sales_data.csv can be used to make sales data available to users offline.

After importing order and invoice data files, you may have our system automatically create your company's sales_data.csv file from that data. To do so, upload a file called sales_data_sentinel.csv along with your order_data.csv and invoice_data.csv. The contents of the sentinel file don't matter. The sales data will be built after the other two files have been imported.

Note that automatic sales data file generation uses data in a data warehouse that's updated hourly to build the summary sales_data.csv file used in eCat on user iPads.

For automatic sales_data.csv file generation to work best, the order_data.csv and invoice_data.csv files should be uploaded to the FTP site roughly an hour before the sales_data_sentinel.csv file is put on the FTP site to start file generation. There may be some variation due to file sizes and server load, but the timing should almost always work if the order and invoice portal data is uploaded by the top of the hour, then the sentinel file at the top of the next hour.

Tips & Tricks #

• CSV file format guidelines
  
• See Sales Information Access for information about how to control/limit access to sales information
• File processing Timeframe: Invoice and order data can be uploaded at any time. However note that while invoice and order details are updated as soon as file processing is complete, dashboard totals and the totals in the customer report depend on a data warehouse update done hourly at 20 minutes after the hour. The warehouse update takes 30-40 minutes to complete. So depending on file upload timing it may be up to one hour and 40 minutes before data changes in the new file take effect.