It would be cool if you added data feeds, for product and inventory to it, and made "giving out" those feeds easy. And then had a system for "consuming" the feeds that was "easy".
As a small eCommerce site, i'd LOVE to have feeds from all my suppliers, but unless you're selling millions a year for them few suppliers bother with the effort. Most suppliers create feeds by having an FTP server, and they periodically throw a csv file on it.
Then as a consumer of the feed, since so many of these solutions are "home grown" you learn to not trust the data. So you have to build up really sophisticated systems. For example if a supplier tells me in a feed he had 10 widgets, and I got that feed 2 hours ago. My algorithm might tell me he only has a reliable supply of 2.
I've thought about building something like this, but I didn't want to get into the business of selling software to suppliers (they're notorious cheap skates).
As a small eCommerce site, i'd LOVE to have feeds from all my suppliers, but unless you're selling millions a year for them few suppliers bother with the effort. Most suppliers create feeds by having an FTP server, and they periodically throw a csv file on it.
Then as a consumer of the feed, since so many of these solutions are "home grown" you learn to not trust the data. So you have to build up really sophisticated systems. For example if a supplier tells me in a feed he had 10 widgets, and I got that feed 2 hours ago. My algorithm might tell me he only has a reliable supply of 2.
I've thought about building something like this, but I didn't want to get into the business of selling software to suppliers (they're notorious cheap skates).