If you ask any of our affiliated retailers to list their top five Doba-related pain points, you’ll hear about items going out of inventory without any advance warning, as well as the sheer number of people attempting to sell many of the same products with the exact same product titles and descriptions. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve made significant strides with respect to both issues. Doba members can now easily customize product title, description, weight, dimension, and more; and, by accessing the new and improved Watchlist, receive updates about product inventory by email.
In today’s post, I’m going to walk you through these changes, which we feel will ultimately make your Doba experience more pleasant and profitable. To get started, let’s first take a look at the new watchlist notification feature, which essentially allows you to receive updates about products within your Doba Watchlist via e-mail.
As you’ll see from the screen capture below, along with adding new functionality, we’ve spiced up the look and feel of certain parts of the Watchlist page:
As you can see, we’ve changed the “View” and “Export” buttons to icons, which are denoted above by binoculars and an arrow. The new addition — the one that allows you to receive email updates about inventory levels — can be accessed by clicking the Gear icon, which opens your Watchlist preferences as seen below.
Once inside Watchlist Preferences, there are many email notification options to choose from. For instance, you can choose to receive inventory level email notifications once or twice a day, and you can even specify what time of the day you’re to receive each one. When using this feature, keep in mind that all times listed on screen are Mountain Standard Time, so be sure to adjust accordingly.
You can also customize the conditions under which you receive updates (i.e., when the supplier’s inventory of the product falls below a certain quantity level, or when the product status changes to “out-of stock” or “discontinued”). As a result, you — the Doba-affiliated online retailer — should no longer experience what was once a common frustration of selling items only to find out that they had been discontinued or gone out of stock without your knowledge.
You can manage your Watchlist notification preferences from the main Watchlist page by clicking on the gears icon in the right hand column of the page, as well as from each individual Watchlist page itself, as shown below.
We hope you’ll agree that managing a Doba watchlist is now easier than ever. Still, in the weeks to come, we will be creating and publishing a multimedia tutorial that takes members through the step-by-step use of these new features. Stay tuned for an announcement about the tutorial (we’ll post news about it here on the blog and mention it in our monthly eNewsletter and the Elite Seller Report).
The next big change I want to cover is the custom data product feature that gives you the ability to enter your own personalized product information for the more than 1.5 million items in the Doba’s catalog. For this particular platform enhancement, we have completed and published (in the member’s area of the site) a detailed multimedia tutorial. For those of you wanting just the highlights, here’s a quick overview:
When visiting a Doba product page, you’ll now notice some minor but important changes.
As you can see from the image above, there are now four action buttons, including: Watch, Push, Edit, and Order. The newly added “Edit” button allows you to edit specific product data that previously was un-editable outside of our Push To Marketplace tool. Clicking the Edit button will take you to a custom data worksheet displaying the original data on the left and customizable fields on the right, as shown below:
Using the fields on the right, you can now input custom data. Once you have gone through all of your changes, simply click the “Save Changes” button and your changes will be reflected on the product page.
For this particular product (shown above), the title and price were modified, and you can clearly see the changes in both the Title and Price fields. There is also a yellow highlighted section that allows you to see that you have indeed modified the product data, as well as an “Edited” icon. From the product page, you can now click on either the Edited icon or the green “Edit” button under the product description to return to your custom data worksheet to make additional changes.
For more information on this new feature, login to your Doba account, click the “Education” tab in the top navigation bar, and watch the Custom Product Data multimedia tutorial.
That’s all for today. I hope you take the time to explore these new platform features. If you have any questions, please contact Doba Support by calling 1-877-321-3622.
it’s very helpfull to us. thank you
Great feature! this will surely help retailers to add more description to products and give their customers a better shopping experience.
keep up the good work.
With hundreds of products spread over several selling venues it was time consuming to check each watchlist twice a day. I am thrilled with the email notice, plus the edit feature now shows me how I have modified the title, so I can easily find my listing among similar merchandise. Doba is the best!
When will you have a datafeed capability where we can download multiple products to our website to populate our existing database?
I am glad to see the improvements, but will someone else’s changes impact my view or are those changes strictly to the user. Also will the number of items we are able to watch going to change.
Great improvements! Thanks!!
Now if you could get all suppliers to actually restock items and not let them sit there for weeks out of stock, I’m sure we would all be grateful. And, they should stock more than just one of an item.
To “Ray Attebery” – My view on datafeeds is that unless you are using one of Doba’s hosting pardners it’s not easy to do. There is a lot of different shopping cart software available, and most would require a special program to convert and populate doba products into your database. That’s not all. You still need to be able to update inventory when needed, set pricing, categories, submit orders to Doba, and more. I am doing it on my site and even tho most everything is automated, it’s still a ‘chore’ keeping up with it.
I’d like to be able to interface with Doba with my back office programs to get the information direct instead of using the ‘product export’ and ‘inventory export’ files, but that’s probably not do-able ..
You have innovated changes here that have addressed the only down side to drop-shipping. Doba is certain to prosper,in my opinion,and I fully intend to ride your coat tails the whole way. Thank you for spending your resources to help make my online business a success. I just have one concern, what will you do next? Revolutionizing the drop-shipping industry will surely be a tough act to follow.
Ray,
I echo much of the same sentiment that Mike has already said. The datafeed or API you speak of is available on our SMB (small to medium business) platform for those using Doba much more heavily than the average user. If you feel your at that point, then feel free to reply and I can set you up with our SMB account consultant, but it is currently not available on Doba at this point in time.
Jason
I assume the api is an extra cost item?
I have heard some negative comments. What city is doba in?
Jason, on the email notifications. It’s a great feature if it doesn’t continue repeating the same item. Do you continue to receive a stock out notification each time the supplier updates their inventory and the item continues to be at zero stock during multiple supplier updates? If it does continue to repeat, that is not good because if you are managing alot of items you won’t be able to tell a new stock out from an existing one. Your thoughts?
Jason, Just finished receiving my second email notification. I have to echo Carlton’s comment above. Too many negatives to share in this blog. All that the emails give you is a snapshot of your watchlist. Same items repeat. At least for me, won’t work. Actually creates more work.
Jerry,
Thank your comments. I assure you we took that into account when designing the Watch List notification feature. The items in your watch list notification are sorted by most recently updated so the items that change more frequent will show up above the items that remain out of stock. If you are only managing a small amount of items, and they all fall below the threshold or settings you set, then yes you will see some duplicate item data.
In our next phase, we are working towards parsing out the item data once it has been sent once if the information hasn’t changed since sending the previous notification. As soon as that feature is updated, we will release an announcement.
Mike,
Yes the API is an extra cost, and is part of our SMB (small to medium business) platform
Beatrice,
The changes you make to your item data are only seen by you. Changes made by others will not be seen by you when logging in to your catalog. Currently there are no plans to change the amount of items you can watch.
I think it should also notify when items are back in stock as well.
I am so tired of waiting for items to be restocked!! We’re supposed to tell customers 2-6 weeks wait time, but it seems to be inaccurate. Customers get mad, demand a refund (I’ll give it b/c I don’t want a bad rep), and then I get charged $35 from my merchant account. I’m losing money instead of making money!
I’ve just staered using the watchlist email and have no issues with it at present. I found that repeating ‘out of stock’ items in each email keeps me current as to what is re-stocked and what is not. I make the assumption that anything not re-stocked after 2-3 emails will not be re-stocked at all and drop the items from my catalog.
Jennifer ..
2-6 weeks is too long for anyone to wait. I ran into the same situation with a supplier several weeks ago and dropped him. I make it a practice to drop any supplier that takes an excessive amount of time to ‘re-stock’ items.
I realize not all of us can do this, but ..
(m)
Quote:It’s a great feature if it doesn’t continue repeating the same item. Do you continue to receive a stock out notification each time the supplier updates their inventory and the item continues to be at zero stock during multiple supplier updates? If it does continue to repeat, that is not good because if you are managing alot of items you won’t be able to tell a new stock out from an existing one. Your thoughts? endquote
When you are notified it is out of stock, go to watchlist and delete OR you will continue to receive the notice. I absolutely love this time saver.
like this, i was actually wondering if i could do this