Live Assistant Pro - Pre-Loading Inventory - 7 Examples To Mix & Match To Best Serve Your Business
Pre-Loading Inventory - 7 Examples To Mix & Match To Best Serve Your Business
Live Assistant Pro works best when you Pre-Load your inventory before going live. That way, Live Assistant Pro knows what you are selling, the price, how many, and what variations you have and will use this information during the live and create a very robust Sales History Report at the end of the live to accelerate invoicing and enable future auto-invoicing.
CSV files are simple "Comma-Separated Values) spreadsheets that are standard with all spreadsheet programs. If you have a Gmail account, you can use Google Sheets at sheets.google.com or if you have a mac, you can download "Numbers" and there are other simple spreadsheets available on app stores or many may have Microsoft Excel. any of these will work for creating this Pre-Loading Inventory files.
Example Entries in an Inventory CSV
Single simple Claim Item 1 with a description, quantity, and price.
Single simple item using variant options as further descriptors (optional)
note: On this example, We gave the item a single variant each of Medium and Blue. You can see in the Live Dashboard Example (right of the white bag, it shows Medium and Blue). As these variations are only one each, we use these mostly for labels. As they only have one option each, the customer does not need to mention them to claim. So to claim this item, Sold 1 or Sold 1 M or Sold 1 Blue, or Sold 1 Blue M would all work. Most customers would just write Sold 1. If the color option has two options, Red and Blue, then a Sold 1 would come back as a comment the customer must specify color and the item wouldn't be claimed, Thus to claim items with more than one variation contents, the variation has to be included, for example, Sold 1 Blue.
Single Variant Set - Size
Items with Variants like Size & Color are given the same Claim Number across multiple lines, and to claim them comment Sold 3 S or Sold 3 M or sold 3 L
Multi-Variant Set
Multi-Variant SKUs like Size & Color is similar to single variant sets, it takes more lines to list all unique variations (listing each color/size combination on it's own line in this example). Enables sales like sold 4 S/M Yellow or sold 4 M/L Blue. Note ALL items of a set must have the same claim_number (this example, being 4). As this is a multi-variant set, the customer must list the two variants they wish, color and size, so Sold 4 won't claim an item, thus "Sold 4 m/l yellow".
Claim Ranges Example - Flash Sale
It's possible on one line to create a range of claim numbers with the same claiming information. The below example is for 100 products, all with a general description for $5. This would enable claims like sold 100, sold 150, sold 200, all being $5.00 Gently Worn Clothing This Claim Range feature can be very powerful as you can give your full live a general description and price for a $5 flash sale. Each item can be a different garment, different color, or different size, but with one line, you could categorize your whole live with pricing and a general description that is enough to invoice from manually or future invoice automation.
Note: This capability is very flexible and should be adaptable to your style. A $10 Flash Sale, just change the price in the spreadsheet. Perhaps you curate your inventory into two sections, $5 items and $10 items. Just put each group into two different number ranges and use two lines in your spreadsheet. 1-50 - Gently Worn Clothing $5.00 and 51-100 Gently Worn Clothing $10.00. It's up to your needs, just adapt these tools to your business and your specific Live needs.
Claim Ranges Example- Re-Use Same CSV For Repeated Fast Price-Segmented Live Sales
Perhaps you have 4-6 key price points you often sell products at. Here we give an example of how to use Claim Ranges to accelerate your lives with minimum prep before each live and can be adjusted once or as needed for your business size, style, different prices, more price points, and smaller or larger ranges. In this example, the retailer has 5 key price points: $5, $10, $15, $20 and $25.
Pre-Set Claim Numbers
So the retailer creates 5 containers that mark each key price point to sell their products. You then put ranges of numbered live tiles into each container.
Pre-Set Inventory Spreadsheet
Now the retailer can create a reusable inventory spreadsheet to match the price ranges and number ranges of Live Tiles you have in your containers.
Pre-Live Inventory Curation
Now with the above one-time prep work, each live can have pricing and basic descriptions quite quickly. So you start curating what you are going to sell, in this example, it is clothes on a rack. As you choose the curation, begin placing them on the rack in your standard pricing sections from the lowest cost on the left and most expensive on the right and place them in groups, like the $5-$25 groups we created in this example, but alter the recipe to suit your business and adjust if you don't quite get it right or if your business grows. Then, once you have sorted the groups into your pricing groups, grab the $5 tiles and apply them to the first group, $10 tiles for the second group, etc. The order of the tiles does not particularly matter, just keep each category within the groups you set up. Now that this is done, when you go live and upload your "Pre-Set Inventory Spreadsheet with this Range Claim Standard List when customers claim items, we will know and respond with the correct price point and description in the Live Dashboard, Back to the customers in the live and recorded in your Sales History.
Claim Examples During Live - Showing Live Dashboard & Claim Responses In Live
We believe for many retailers, they can adapt one CSV and a choice of number of containers and live tile ranges to cover most if not all their Live Sales going forward. Thus allowing retailers to settle on just one CSV to use each live and one Live Tile Setup.
In this example of Claim Range Live Tile Sets, we show a potentially larger set with more volume of tiles and more price points. Please realize you can adjust for your business, your price points, the volume of goods you sell at each price point. Generally, people sell more volume at lower price points, so we show that in this example. We also notice some customer segments have $5 Flash Sales, so in this example, we show the $5 bowl having nearly 100 numbers. This would allow you to have one CSV file that could span sales across 8 price points or, using the same CSV, just have a $5 Flash Sale. This is all so you can create one set up, one time, then going forward, you just Curate your inventory you wish to sell pre-live, tag them with the appropriate price tiles and sell. This gives you better information during the sale and in your sales history, and once Auto Invoicing is ready, you will be able to save an hour or two at the end of lives and bring in more sales by sending invoices faster once the sale is over.
Claim Ranges Example- Similar But Unique Items
If you had 20 of the same exact item, you wouldn't need to use Claim Ranges, you would just do one line that has a single claim number and qty set to 20. But if you have 20 of a very similar item, but with enough variation that customers will want to choose their specific item, then Claim Ranges work great for this as a shortcut versus writing 20 lines of inventory detail. In this example, the retailer has 20 Brown purses, but each purse has its own distinct personality with perhaps accent colors, designs, tassels, etc. So the 20 are brown leather, all $24.99, but each has its own claim number, 201, 202, 210, 220, etc.
You have now seen examples of seven ways to configure your Inventory CSV. You can choose 1, a few or all of these ways to incorporate into your Inventory files to balance your time, the details you need/wish to be listed, and the style/size of your business.
There are 11 fields or column headers in our CSV Inventory Sheet, several you likely won't need.
claim_number - This is the number a customer would use during a sale to claim an item. So if claim_number was 1, then the customer could claim it with a "sold 1".
product_title - This is the description for each item(s) you sell. This can be as general or specific to your needs. We recommend keeping it to a few words if possible. We display this product_title during the FB Live in comments and also list it in Sales History.
quantity - This is the quantity you have on hand to sell for this item(s).
price = this is the price you wish to sell the item for during the upcoming FB Live.
claim_number_range_end: Optional feature that can be quite a powerful tool. It's possible on one line to create a range of numbers with the same information. For example, a claim_number set to 100 and a claim_number_range_end set to 200, product_title set to "Gently Worn Clothing", qty set to 1, and price set to $5.00 would enable claims like sold 100, sold 150, sold 200, all being $5.00 Gently Worn Clothing. This Claim Range option can give all your live items a general description and price, for example, for a $5 flash sale, or you can use it repeatedly on groups of items that are the same description and price, but different physically, like similar purses, but just unique enough, you want to have a separate claim number for each one and sell them separately due to their unique styles/accents. Consider this an accelerator tool to allow you to cover many consecutive numbers in a range with the same description, price & quantity.
Be careful with claim ranges to not overlap numbers. So having a line with a claim range of 1-50, then on a second line have a claim range of 25-75 would conflict. The 25-50 wouldn't know what to be and this will cause an error. So every number listed in the CSV needs to be only listed once.
note on variants: Variant functionality allows you to sell a type of product that may have many variations like size and color. For example, a shirt with 3 colors and 5 sizes. Or a pair of shoes in 10 sizes. With Variants, you can sell this family of products with one claim or sku or barcode. For the example of a shirt: sold 123 blue M, sold 123 red 3xl or the example of shoes: sold 234 10.5, sold 234 12
variant_option1_type - This is the label for the first variant if needed. Whatever variation you have of the product you are selling. Common examples of a variant label would be size, color, and length.
variant_option1 - This is the actual contents of the variation you're adding. If the label was Size, then perhaps the variant_option1 contents would be small, medium, large or for color, red, blue, green, etc. Each variation_option1 option must be on its own line with the same claim_number to be claimed as one family of products.
variant_option2_type - This is the label for a second variant if needed. So for example, if the variant_option1_type is color, then perhaps the variant_option2_type would be the size.
variant_option2 - This is the actual contents of the variation your adding to variant_option2_type. If it was the size, then perhaps small, medium, and large would be potential entries. Each entry must be on its own line with its own claim number.
barcode - This allows you or some inventory tool to have barcodes for your items. If your items are barcoded and you enter those barcodes in the barcode field, then you can use a barcode scanner during the live to identify what you are selling and the description will be commented on in the live. You can also hand type in a claim number, SKU, or barcode into that claim item/barcode/sku field and it will comment on the live the items information.
sku - Similar to the barcode, some inventory systems use SKU based. We believe if your creating your own inventory list, sku is not needed, just use claim_number.
notes - Just for any notes you wish to add.