Product: Nexternal
It’s tempting to re-use discontinued products instead of creating new products. For example, when you run the same Summer Special each year, to re-activate the product in your OMS that you used for the same promo last year, and tweak it just a bit. Or, for another example, to use the same wine product for a new vintage, and just tweak the vintage and description a bit, instead of creating a new product in the Order Management System (OMS).
However, while this seems like the easiest path, it will have a detrimental effect on your reporting. When you create a product in the OMS, the platform assigns it a product number, upon which all reporting is based. So, for example, to see the total amount sold, you could easily look that up by product. However, if you change that existing product in name and vintage only, for example, the system still sees the same product number and doesn't realize it has changed - so the sales numbers will all be bundled together, even though it might be two different products to you.
Therefore, we recommend that each time you need a product, you create a new one, and not re-use an old one. Remember that you can always make a copy of an existing product by pressing the green copy icon next to the edit pencil, and you can tweak from there. But the copy will have a new product number which signals to the system to report on it separately.
rev: 10/21/20