In many cases a customer is looking to merge sales of old item data into a newer existing item so that they can get a more complete historical record of sales, even an item's sku number may change in the retailers reporting system. Lots of times, a new sku is generated simply due to a minor packaging change or some other factor not critical to the item's performance. This document provides some strategies on how to manage these changes to get a flexible picture without altering history in the database itself.
Step-by-step guide
- Identify the old and new item numbers for each item you have.
- Choose one of the 24 categorization fields and delineate one of them as "Common Item" or some other moniker to highlight the purpose.
- We'll copy each item's retailer item number into the chosen field above.
- We'll take the the new item numbers for each of the items we want to merge in step 1 and copy the new item over the old item number in step three.
- What this does is create a "category" that looks like an item, but allows us to group by the "Common Item" category, thereby summing sales and merging the old item sales into the new item's category.
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