Variations & Attributes

[MyVintageVinyl]

I am moving from the Leprechaun company to Square this month.  There is just not enough support for Retail with the other company.  Here is my challenge.  I own a vintage vinyl record store.  I am (a little) technical savvy but before I migrate my Leprechaun inventory to Square, I want to do it right.

Scenario:

Product =        Meet the Beatles

UPC =             T2047 or ST2047 (Mono versus Stereo)

Here is where it gets complicated because our vinyl records are used and there are many different possibilities.

I THINK we should use the attribute field to identify three components common to all used vinyl:

• Year (the last two digits of the year)
• Quality (0-9; 0 = Mint Cover/Mint Vinyl, 1 = Near Mint Cover/Near Mint Vinyl…)
• Presence of Inserts (4 values; X = No Inserts, A= All inserts present, B= Some inserts present…)

Thus, an attribute for us might look like:  640X which indicates an album from 1964 (64) in Mint Condition (0) with no Inserts (X).

So, continuing my example from above for “Meet the Beatles”

Attribute =      640X

Lastly, I have a wildly unpredictable variation from album to album.  That I think, is most accurately recorded in Square as… a variation.  For example:

• No producer credit on back cover
• Produced by George Martin on back cover
• ASCAP & BMI Credits Missing

From reading the community feedback, I don’t think Modifier will work in any of my situations.  Does anyone have insight on how I might do this easier than my three-part “code” for the Attribute field?

Regrettably, it does not appear as though I can import a complete Attribute table, I’ll have to do it individually.

Below are images if it helps for clarification.

Thank you in advance for any advise.

Respectfully,

Steve

[Donnie-M]

@MyVintageVinyl This is a very interesting scenario.  I'll just give you my initial reaction and see if it sparks any ideas.

I assume you want to be able to search and find specific albums quickly and then be able to tell whoever what this specific item is.  For inventory purposes, I would be careful to not create too many variations as each variation is an inventory item.  Inventory is tracked at the variation level.  Typically and Item has 1 variation.  Using options, which you may have found, will create a large amount of variations.

The question is what level of inventory management are you needing vs. ability to search inventory for specific items?

[MyVintageVinyl]

@Donnie-M Thank you for the quick response.

Your initial assumption was correct.  I want the ability to search quickly to see all of the versions of a particular album I have.  Based on your feedback, should I establish Variation to be the years?  Every album has a specific year it was produced.  In the example provided, two Items (the stereo and the mono version) would have the years 1964 and 1965 assigned as Variations.  This would then simplify my Attributes to be 01-10 with a letter appended for whether inserts exist or not (e.g., 01X)

Am I making sense?  I know it is difficult to explain things which are unique to the record store business.

Thank you,

Steve

[Donnie-M]

@MyVintageVinyl You might want to look at using the categories as another way to organize items (however those don't translate as directly to the online store but not out of the question to set up that way.

I will have to ruminate on this a little more and see what comes to mind.  The issue is the amount of items and variations can be huge in this type of situation.  Square is great at taking payments and managing how much each thing costs.  Inventory is doable, but you have a pretty large database you want to search.  This might be best served by a 3rd party integration with square.   I will see what I come across.  But, if you can get by on say category stereo/mono, album name, variation year and then the custom attributes are just information on that specific item..maybe.  The problem would be if you had 2 albums, same year, same name, both stereo, that is where the inventory tracking would end.  You couldn't have custom attributes for both items.

Another thought might just be in the way you name the items.  I have done this to designate the same item for different locations without using the location flag so I can quickly see what item goes where.  I have an item BLT - RV and BLT - CCC  one is for riverview cafe and one is for city county so it changes what I have where.