No, in this market different resellers pay different prices for the same product from the same supplier and are often determined by how much you spend with your suppliers. Therefore, there is not just one set trade price but hundreds.

To see your “buy prices “, you will have to apply to each supplier and be approved by them to see the prices.  However, about 20 of the suppliers (particularly parts suppliers) show prices to anyone who applies, and you are automatically approved.

Absolutely, we offer a free, no obligation, the two-month trial of the service. To know more about Price Comparison service please visit our page or contact us.

No. The suppliers must approve your application to see prices, so if you are not a reseller, you will not get approved by some of the suppliers.

The distributors normally set you up within 48 hours of your application.

Yes, you can use those feeds, however, we recommend that you use our interface to apply again to those suppliers. Some you can try with your existing login details.

This service is available with our “Webstore package” where you can add any of your suppliers. Some resellers have 150 private suppliers set up including their own warehouse stock – in addition to the suppliers we show publicly.

Yes, you need to apply to each of your suppliers individually via Stock in the Channel.

Yes, absolutely. We take the stock and price feed from your suppliers (which contain your personalised “buy prices”) and we match the products with descriptions, specifications, images and other content. We then give you tools to add profit margins, edit content, filter and personalise the categorisation. You would still buy the products from your suppliers even if you automate your purchasing through our services.

IT, Office, Toner & Telecoms are our key areas. However, we are constantly reviewing and expanding the range of suppliers. If you are involved in another area, we may still be able to help.

Stock in the Channel provides webinars, guide videos or documentation and other support.

We have a fully functioning demo webstore for you to try everything before buying our service. To have access please sign up here and our Sales Team will provide you access.

We also provide a Stock in the Channel Demo account and Sample data for Magento1 and Magento 2.

Drop ship is when your suppliers send products directly to your customers under the plain label. The IT and office products industry work like this and always has. There are no middlemen with our system. You, the reseller, still have a direct relationship with your suppliers.

With our turnkey offer, you can be up and be running within a couple of days.

Magento, a free open source shopping cart owned by eBay, is highly recommended by us. We have built many enhancements around it. However, if you are using any other cart, as long as you can import large numbers of products every day and have the technical knowledge to do so, you provide support.

There are 100,000 developers and designers around the world – plus thousands of plugins and template designs to choose from. So, the answer to this point is a resounding YES!!

You have all the digital marketing tools available to you without restriction, so you can pretty much do what you like. Many of our customers have been successful selling on eBay, Amazon and Google shopping. Free plugins are available to facilitate the integration between platforms.

You can set up price lists per customer group, with margins by category, brand and price range. You can also set up specific prices for selected customers on selected products. You can punchout-enable your webstore, link to your CRM and ERP and so display invoice history on your online store – both online and offline including customer portal options.

Once you have paid your datafeed invoice, you will need to wait for an overnight import for the products from your suppliers to be imported into your feed.

If you log into Stock in the Channel, select “Standard View” in the drop-down menu then select your datafeed, you will be taken to the Dashboard, from where you will be given an overview of your feed.

In the bottom right-hand corner there is a Data File section which provides you with the FTP details needed to access your feed.

There are two ways to see whether products are being included within your feed:

1. Download FileZilla and enter your FTP credentials to view the files.
2. Select your datafeed on Stock in the Channel then search for the desired product in the search bar. If the product is included within the feed, then it will display as “Published”. If not, then it will detail as to why it is not being published (below stock level or category excluded).

Go to “View All Distributors” to set up your private feed.

Click “Add a Private Feed” and name your feed.

Select whether to Pull or Push your feed.

• Pull– You will need to enter the server name, credentials, folder and filename of the feed.
• Push– You will need to manually upload your feed to one of the provided locations.

Select the file’s format and make sure that it contains the required columns before publishing the file.

If you are not hosted by us then the first thing you will need to do is contact one of our team to set you up with the order processing package. You can contact any member of our team to set you up here

After contacting us you will need to provide us with “root” SSH credentials to your server as well as Magento username and password. We will take things from there and continue the integration with us ourselves. The process should take no longer than a day and there will be no downtime to your store.

We offer a frequent stock and price update for your website if you need it to ensure when a customer orders from your website, the price will be the same when the order is placed. Contact your account manager for more details.

After you have spoken to your account manager about hourly stock then you will need to set up a little configuration on your server to take advantage of this service.

If you are not hosted with us then you will need to edit the import plugin on your Magento website. Login via FTP to your Magento store and go to: /app/code/local/Bintime/Sinchimport/etc and edit the file config.xml

Find the line:

<stockpricesinchimport>
	<schedule><cron_expr>0 8 * * *</cron_expr></schedule>
	<run><model>sinchimport/sinch::cron_start_stock_price_import</model></run>
</stockpricesinchimport>

and change to

<stockpricesinchimport>
	<schedule><cron_expr>0 * * * *</cron_expr></schedule>
	<run><model>sinchimport/sinch::cron_start_stock_price_import</model></run>
</stockpricesinchimport>

If you are not on our turnkey solution, you will have to follow these instructions to integrate with Stock in the Channels order processing system

• Log into the customers Magento. (Credentials are often find in Sinch admin).
• In Magento admin go to -> System -> Configuration from the header menu.
• Scroll down and on the LHS (left hand side) click “Magento Core API”.
• Make sure “WS-I Compliance” is set to “Yes”.
• Make sure “Enable WSDL Cache” is set to “Yes”.
• Save any changes.

You will also need to create a SOAP / XML Role and user which you can find instructions below on how to do so.

Note: if you are on our turnkey solution then we will apply this change for you

If you are not on our turnkey solution, you will have to follow these instructions to integrate with Stock in the Channels order processing system

• Log into the customers Magento. (Credentials are often find in Sinch admin).
• In Magento admin go to -> System -> Web Services -> SOAP/XML-RPC – Roles from the header menu.
• Click “Add New Role”.
• In the “Role Info” tab enter a role name (typically “Sinch”) and in the “Role Resources” tab set “Resource Access” to “All”
  Save any changes.
• Go to -> System -> Web Services -> SOAP/XML-RPC – User from the header menu.
• Click “Add New User”.
• In the “User Info” tab fill in all the required details. “Sinch” is typically used for the “User Name” and the “API Key” should be a secure password. In the “User Role” tab make sure to assign the user to the role created in the steps above.
• Save any changes.

Note: if you are on our turnkey solution then we will apply this change for you

It can be, where our system automatically chooses the best way to fulfil the order including delivery charges, but if you wish you can manually approve orders, select suppliers – or even choose to consolidate selected orders. We allow you to continue working as your currently do – just better.

Order status and tracking information is automatically returned to our system and can then be exported to your webstore or through to your ERP or CRM allowing you always to know exactly what is happening to all orders you have placed.

The system sends out PDF purchase orders by email to these suppliers, with the ability for them to confirm receipt. This keeps the process efficient for you – it is the supplier who carries the cost of not supporting efficient systems. Since these suppliers may not support status and track information, you can set up the system to assume the order is delivered or manually mark orders as complete.

Pretty much all the bigger suppliers in the UK are in Stock in the Channel. However, if there is a supplier that we currently don’t support they can be easily added. This is often done free of charge, just contact us here and we will send you and your supplier all the necessary information.

Yes, we have a complete and open API as well as file transfer methods supported. Solutions are offered for Sage 50, Sage 200 and Navision, although many other systems have been accommodated. Data exchange includes customers, orders, purchase orders, supplier invoices, pricing matrices and order status.

Produce a file of your products to be added to your page by either uploading it to our server or collecting it from yours. The file should include part number, stock, price and a brief description and any further information you feel necessary. By producing a file of products with password protection, the file is always safe and always up to date, making sure your site is secure and successful.

Our system imports products information in three steps: Product, Stock and Price.

Products along with their Prices are imported once a day, and Stock is updated every hour.

All the price accounts can be manually uploaded if requested

Send your customers and partners the link to your private page where they can sign-up to see your stock and prices. With application approval, you are in complete control of who sees your stock and can set different price lists to display according to user type.

1. Provision your server and install Magento
2. Install our Magento plugin.
3. 3. Add sample data credentials to Magento in our plugin.

Note: this may sound easy, but unless you are a Magento developer you will have issues.

We strongly recommend a dedicated server for your web store. Magento is very resource intensive and you should not skimp on hardware. In addition, the plug-in requires some changes in server configuration. You must have SSH, root access to the server you are going to be used to make these changes.

You should ensure you have a minimum of 2 GB of memory available for up to 50,000 products. This is an absolute minimum. Adding more memory will be very beneficial to performance. Very large product sets will benefit from multi-core processors.

The plug-in requires your server to be configured in a certain way. We recommend these settings:

• Magento 1.9.2.2 or above (This does not work with Magento 2)
• Latest Version of PHP with CURL
• Latest Version of MySQL
• In your php.ini file, turn safe mode “off”: safe_mode = Off
• In my.cnf, Enable loaddata: set-variable=local-infile=1. Set the wait_timeout = 28000. Change innodb_buffer_pool_size = 512MB – higher, if publishing large product sets

The import of both the Full Catalogue and the Stock and Prices can be automated by setting up a cron job.

The first task is to ensure that Cron is calling Magento correctly.

To do this add the following code to your Crontab:
/5 * * * * /[SHOP DIR]/cron.sh
Note: [SHOP DIR]/ is the path to your installation of Magento See article on how to set up a cron job in Magento here.

By default, the Stock and Prices import is set to run daily at 8 am and the full import at 11 pm once a week on Saturday.

If you are not happy with these times, you can change them by modifying the following file:

[SHOP DIR]/app/code/local/Bintime/Sinchimport/etc/config.xml

We have a few recommendations to make sure your website performs at its best when you are hosting your own website:

• Use Nginx over Apache
• Use GZip compression
• Use redis cache and activate it in your magento local.xml
• Minify Javascript and CSS
• Turn on Magento cache

Ensure the magento logs don’t fill up, run this command via SSH from your magento root directory to clear all the logs:

• rm -rf var/locks/*
• php -f downloader/mage.php clear-cache
• rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/*
• rm -rf downloader/pearlib/download/*
• rm -rf var/cache/*
• rm -rf var/session/*
• rm -rf var/report/*
• rm -rf var/tmp/*

There are a few ways you are able to install our plugin:

1. Install via Magento connect – in the backend of your Magento, navigate to system -> Magento connect manager -> login and in the paste in the extension key to install box http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community/stockinthechannel2012 (recommended)
2. You can install our plugin via ftp and drop the files into your Magento root directory, you can get a copy of the latest plugin files here

An error occurs if you have previously installed the plug-in manually by copying the files over to your Magento installation via FTP and then try and install a later version via Magento Connect.

Before you can install the plug-in via Magento Connect, you will need to manually remove all the files and folders you have copied over. You can view all the files and folders in the plug-in, by unzipping it to your local PC and then viewing it.

Download the Stock in the Channel files here

When you have installed the plug-in, it should appear as a link in the ”’System – Configuration”’ section of the Magento Back office.

If it does not appear, you may need to refresh the Magento cache ”’System – Cache Management”’
If it still does not appear, or you get a 404 Page not found error when you click on the Stock In The Channel Link, then try logging out of Magento and then logging in again

There are a few error messages that the Stock in the Channel plug-in may display:

The most common Error Messages you will see are:

“You need to assign more rights to Magento cron ”– These errors are Ok and not to worry about as they are just informing you that the permissions of your cron.sh and cron.php files in the root folder of your Magento installation may need more permissions to run the automated import. The owner of these files should ideally be the same as your Magento files or root with the permissions 644.

“Wait for timeout is too short “- This should give you your current wait timeout value. in your my.cnf file, please increase the timeout to 28000. Our plugin will need this much time as depending on the number of products you have, will need time to index.

“Some of the installed modules rewrite SinchImport module “- This error message is indicating that some of the currently installed plugins might interfere with our plugin. You can disable the plugin by going to app/code/modules and changing within the XML file “true” to “false”. You can identify the plugins that interfere with our plugin by setting false to any plugin that manipulates product or category URL’s, changes the category tree or makes changes to the catalogue.

There are several possible reasons why even after making sure the server is configured correctly, the import does not run.

Firstly, check to make sure you are using the right credentials in the backend of your webstore. Under System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Stock in the channel. Open the FTP Login Details Section and make sure you are using the correct credentials. If you do NOT have a feed from Stock in the Channel we provide sample data here.

If you are still having issues with importing products, here are a few more reason that might be causing it:

• Firewall blocking FTP access– The plug-in works by downloading files via FTP. You need to make sure that the FTP ports (20 and 21) are not blocked on your server or on a firewall protecting the server.
• Insufficient write permissions– When the product files are downloaded they are copied into a folder within the ”’var folder”’ on your Magento install. You must make sure that the folder and its sub-folders have to write permissions for the appropriate user.
• Incorrect detection of the version of PHP– The plug-in normally detects the version of PHP correctly. However, in some rare server configurations, it does not do so correctly, and the value needs to be hardcoded. To do this open up ”’app/code/local/Bintime/Sinchimport/Model/config.php”’ and replace the phrase “define(PHP_RUN_STRING, ‘php ‘);” with “define(PHP_RUN_STRING, ‘php5 ‘);“
• Exec Permissions not available– The Linux user under whose account Magento is running must have sufficient privileges to run PHP. If you have set restrictive privileges, then try loosening them and then resetting them. See Magento documentation for suggested suitable permissions structure.
• Data Corruption– On rare occasions, the product data within Magento can become corrupted and the import fails. In this case, you should try deleting all the products and categories within Magento and re-import.

If after following the above instructions the import is still failing, please contact our support team.

We previously looked at developing a PrestaShop plugin. However, we came across complications due to the way that PrestaShop handles incoming data. We are looking at alternative methods to ensure reasonable speed is acquired.

You can include your own stock – prioritise it, set strategic pricing for it and more. Instead of purchase orders to suppliers, our system creates shipping notes. Even those companies who fulfil completely from their own stock can benefit by reducing the stock of non-core lines and increasing your range to supply every toner via drop-ship

While our service enables a transactional model by automating invoice and PO processing, you can choose to simply use our system to get the supplies delivered and not provide the breakdown of what’s been ordered.

You can set a stock threshold for the products on your feed by logging into your Stock In The Channel account and, in the top navigation, select your stores area from the drop-down menu. On your dashboard, navigate to ‘Markups’, where you can set your stock threshold. If you set the stock threshold to 0, then all the products with 0 stock will be included in your data feed.

To set a global markup for all of your products and categories, log into your Stock In The Channel account, in the top navigation select your stores area from the drop-down. On your dashboard, navigate to ‘Markups’ and set a global markup. This type of markup will add a price increase to all of the products in your feed, e.g. a markup of 10% on £10 products will have the final price of £11.

To set a global markup for all of your products and categories, log into your Stock In The Channel account, in the top navigation select your stores area from the drop-down. On your dashboard, navigate to ‘Markups’, then go to the pricing rules section and click “Add Rule”.

To set a cost price uplift, log into your Stock In The Channel account, in the top navigation select your store’s area from the drop-down. On your dashboard, navigate to ‘Distributors’. You can choose between an absolute value or a percentage.

Note: This is not markup, this is an uplift on the cost price before any markup is applied.

If you would like to become a distributor in Stock in the Channel, please contact us.

To manage your categories, log into your Stock In The Channel account, in the top navigation select your stores area from the drop-down. On your dashboard, navigate to categories.

To reorder your categories, you can drag and drop the folders in the right order on the categories page. You can also drag and drop the folders inside other folders which will make them a sub folder.

You can edit your category information by selecting the category you would like to edit on the left-hand navigation. Editable information will appear on the right hand side where you can change:

• Category Name
• Main Image
• Thumb Image
• Description
• Publish
• Hide in Navigation
• Meta Title
• Meta Description

All the filters in Stock in the Channel are created based on the information and specifications of products. These are then connected and organised in our default categories.

If you create a new category, no category filter will be applied, this will then also be reflected in your webstore. We always suggest the customer to customise our default categories in order to maintain the filters.

Note: you will have to have some knowledge of HTML / PHP

If you have imported our data and you go to a product page and find that your more images are coming up small then your theme currently does not support image urls. You theme is configured to look for an image file instead of an image link which we can change easily.

Firstly you will need to find out if a plugin is controlling your more than images or not e.g cloudzoom, lightbox etc… 70% of themes will have their own built in method for these images.

Login to the FTP for your website and navigate to the Magento directory. Go To the folder location: app/design/frontend/default/(your theme)/template/catalog/product/view and open media.phtml. If your theme is using a plugin to view the images then the file location may be different. Look for a line that looks like: $this->getGalleryImages(). If your theme has a $_imageUrl that is being defined look for

$_image->getFile()

and change to

$_image->getUrl().

If your theme does not have this then look for the “div class=”more-views” and find the “a href” that defines the image link.

Change the getFile() to getUrl()

only within the “a href”. Save the file and upload it back via FTP. Clear Cache (if active) and refresh your page

Most themes come preconfigured to use the full width for the category image. So depending on how wide your theme width is, it will try to stretch the Stock in the Channel image to the full width so the best method to use is to make this change via FTP.

Login to ftp and go to your Magento directory. Then go to skin/frontend/default/(your theme)/css and open the file styles.css. This may be different if your theme uses another css to manipulate the category section.

Find “.category-image img”. You will want to change / add: width: auto; max-width:100%; margin:auto; display:block;

There are a few reasons why this might occur, the steps we suggest you take are:

• Login to the backend of your store and flush all the caches. Refresh the page and check
• Make sure compiler is disabled. In the backend of Magento, go to System->Tools->Compilation and ensure “Compiler Status” is set to “Disabled”
• If you have tried both things above then please feel free to contact our support department if you are on our Turnkey Solution here otherwise please contact your hosting provider to check the server logs

If you or one of your users have recently tried to install / reinstall / uninstall a Magento plugin via Magento Connect Manager and it fails for some reason. Magento will display this message on your store.

To remove this message you will need to login to your website via FTP. In your Magento root directory you will find a file named “maintenance.flag”. Magento adds this file automatically when a problem occurs so all you will have to do is delete it. Refresh the frontend of your website and your website will be back up.

If you are on our Turnkey Solution then feel free to contact us and we can install any plugin for you

This may be a rare occurrence, but if you are on our Turnkey Solution and you receive this message when trying to go to your webstore, contact us to investigate this for you as it is a server related error. This could be cause by many reasons, some of the most common are listed below:

• Memory out of space
• Your Server is under DDOS
• Your website hit its Max_Client / Max_Server_Limit settings
• PHP could not find the right socket

There are two different ways to set up your host file depending on your operating system: Windows – MacOS / Linux

Windows

• Find the application ‘Notepad’ and open it as administrator
• Once in the Application, go to File -> Open
• Go to the path C:WindowsSystem32driversetc
• Open the file labelled “hosts”. Note: If you can’t see any files, ensure the file type in the bottom right is set to all file types.
• Under the line # ::1 localhost enter the server IP address and domain name in the format 127.0.0.1 mydomain.com www.mydomain.com
• Click Save
• Finished, go to your browser and type in the domain you just saved in the host file and it should be pointing to the same server IP you set on the same line as the domain name

Mac

• To Start, make sure you are the administrative account or have administrative rights
• Go to Spotlight(search button on the top right) and type in Terminal
• Open the terminal application. You will be prompted with a white box with some text in it.
• Type in sudo nano /etc/hosts
• You will be prompted to type in your password for the admin account. This should be the password that you use to log into your computer. As you type, you will not see anything being typed on the screen as this is a security feature to stop people overlooking you from behind to see your password.
• Hit the enter button, you should now see something like:
  # 127.0.0.1 localhost
  # ::1 localhost
• Under the line # ::1 localhost enter the server IP address and domain name in the format 127.0.0.1 mydomain.com www.mydomain.com Please change this information with the information provided by your account manager.
• To Save, Hold Ctrl + press o, then hold Ctrl + press x
• Finished, go to your browser and type in the domain you just saved in the host file and it should be pointing to the same server IP you set on the same line as the domain name

If you do not like the iframes that are on your product pages and would like to get rid of them then we can walk you through how to do this on the phone so please feel free to contact us on: 0333 772 0003 or email us at support@stockinthechannel.com and leave a little message with your name, contact information and indication that you are “looking to get rid of the iframes on your Magento store”.

There are a few reasons why this might occur, the steps we suggest you take are:

• Login to the backend of your store and flush all the caches. Refresh the page and check
• Make sure compiler is disabled. In the backend of Magento, go to System->Tools >Compilationand ensure “Compiler Status” is set to “Disabled”
• If you have tried both things above then please feel free to contact our support department if you are on our Turnkey Solution otherwise please contact your hosting provider to check the server logs

Login via FTP and navigate to the template that your template uses to display the product view page. The path should be something like: /app/design/frontend/default/(your theme)/template/catalog/product/view.phtml

Edit the view.phtml template and add this code where you would like it to display:

<p>
<b><?php echo $this->__('SKU: ') ?></b>
<span><?php echo nl2br($_product->getSku()) ?></span>
</p>

Login via FTP and navigate to the template that your template uses to display the product view page. The path should be something like: /app/design/frontend/default/(your theme)/template/catalog/product/view.phtml

Edit the view.phtml template and add this code where you would like it to display:

 <p>
      <b><?php echo $this->__('MANUFACTURER: ') ?></b>
      <span><?php echo $_product->getAttributeText('manufacturer'); ?></span>
 </p>

Login via FTP and navigate to the template that your template uses to display the product view page. The path should be something like: /app/design/frontend/default/(your theme)/template/catalog/product/view.phtml

Edit the view.phtml template and add this code where you would like it to display:

<p>
      <b><?php echo $this->__('EAN: ') ?></b>
      <span><?php echo nl2br($_product->getEan()) ?></span>
</p>

If you want to change the color scheme of your site or make any other design changes to your site, we are not a design company and therefore can’t build you a custom designed website. However, contact your account manager and they can pass you onto a few of our partners who can give you custom design completely bespoke if required.

To change your PDF design, what you will first need to do is login to your Stock in the Channel account. Once you are logged in, make sure you are in standard view, you can see what view you are in by what is displayed in the dropdown in the navigation bar. In the “My Stock in the Channel” on the bottom left hand side you should see a settings button. If you can’t see this then you may not have the package available to you yet so please . In the quotes section on the right you should see a button labeled “Design PDF”.

We have made it simple for you to add a cover page but adding its own section to the Design PDF interface. Firstly, go to the design pdf section by clicking the setting button on the bottom left hand side of your dashboard in standard view. We have separated the quote into various sections the help you manage the layout. We have added a section called “Cover” which will only be shown 1 time in your final quote.

To change the color scheme of your quote you will need to find the color you want to change in the css section and change the value according to how you want it to look.

To add a logo, you will need to provide an image link to where the image is located. We recommend you use something like imgur.com if you do not have somewhere to add your image.

We have a lot of documentation on how you can integrate your system with us, you can find all the information required here.