Setting Up Your Hardgoods Inventory For The Automated Smart Store
1 - Get export from old POS
Make sure to obtain an export of your inventory from your old point-of-sale system in CSV or EXCEL format. To initiate a successful product activation sync with mydakis make sure to have the following information for each product:
- Product Name
- Brand
- Product UPC
- Product SKU
- Product Regular Price
- Product Sales Price
- Product Quantity
Any other information may be important for the transfer of information from your old POS to Lightspeed, however MyDakis will ignore it.
2 - Clean up your inventory
Once exported, take this opportunity to go through your list of inventory and remove any discontinued items along with items you no longer carry. You should check for duplicated items in your inventory as duplicates are commonly found in inventory exports.
TIPS & TRICKS
A short list of items to remove from your inventory before submitting to Lightspeed:
- Discontinued items
- Items you no longer carry
- Expired classes
- Used items that have been sold
- Rental and repair appointments
- Services you no longer offer
How to quickly find duplicates
Take a look at your UPCs and SKUs. If either a UPC or a SKU appear more than once you should address and correct these instances. To find the duplicates, open your POS export in excel and use the countif function, this will look at the value of a cell and tell you how many times that cell value occurs within a range. You should perform this test twice, once for UPCs and once for SKUs, if the output of either of these tests is greater than one you’ve found a duplicate.
3 - Submit Your Inventory to Lightspeed
Once you’ve cleaned up your list it’s time to submit it to the Lightspeed Retail Imports team so that they can import your inventory into your Lightspeed Retail POS.
To do this, format your inventory so that it fits inside the standardized Lightspeed import spreadsheet.
You can find an extensive description of the submission process here:
https://retail-support.lightspeedhq.com/hc/en-us/articles/229129988-Importing-inventory-data
And here’s a quick link to the request submission form
https://retail-support.lightspeedhq.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=181298
Note that it will take up to 15 days to import your data if Lightspeed’s import team needs to edit your submitted data, make sure the file meets their requirements before submitting your inventory to them.
If you’ve submitted the inventory file and met all of Lightspeed’s requirements you can assume that it will take between 48 to 72 business hours before your inventory appears in Lightspeed.
4 - Import Items Into MyDakis
Once your inventory has been imported into Lightspeed Retail POS you will be able to initiate a handshake between your Lightspeed account and MyDakis in order to start the sync process and populate your MyDakis account.
Before performing the first sync make sure that your account is properly configured so that it connects to Lightspeed, you will need to :
- Set your refresh token
- Push Hardgood shopping carts to Lightspeed (optional but recommended)
- Set your periodical sync (between 1 and 24 hours)
- Get your taxes and configure them in MyDakis
- Get your shop and register list and set the default registers in MyDakis
- Get your employee list and set a default employee in MyDakis
Note that tutorials for the above steps can be found at help.dakis.com under Lightspeed Integration
At this point there are two ways to proceed:
Syncing to an empty MyDakis account
Once your account is properly configured, go to the admin tab and click on Synchronization (left hand side). From here you can click on “Pull Lightspeed inventory to dakis” to initiate the sync; you can expect that the first sync can take up to 24 hours depending on the amount of products you’re sending to MyDakis.
Every item in your Lightspeed Retail POS inventory will send the following information over to MyDakis.
| What Lightspeed sends | What MyDakis does with it |
| UPC | MyDakis will look for a match inside the WebPIM, if there is a match the product associated with this UPC will be made available in your inventory. |
| Custom SKU | This value will be assigned as the product’s SKU. Without an assigned SKU the products will not sync between Lightspeed and MyDakis. A SKU is critical to a successful sync. |
| MSRP | This value will be assigned as the product’s price field in MyDakis |
| Default Price | This value will be assigned as the product’s Sales Price field in MyDakis |
| Quantity | This value will be assigned as the product’s quantity. |
Syncing to a pre-populated MyDakis account
At this point there are two ways to proceed:
- OPTION 1: Delete all items in your MyDakis inventory.
- OPTION 2: Check for items that already exist in MyDakis.
OPTION 1 : Delete all items in your MyDakis inventory
This is the easiest route to take as you’re essentially starting from scratch and the process is relatively quick.
Although this option is the quickest one, you need to be aware of the fact that you’ll be deleting active items that do not have UPCs. Items without matching UPCs will not be automatically added during a Lightspeed sync. Also of importance, there will be a period of time where your website will have no items online, this would be between when you delete all your items and when you perform the first sync.
Note that the overwhelming majority of newer items in MyDakis have a UPC, therefore they will sync if the UPC is correct in Lightspeed. It’s also of importance to mention that items will start appearing in your WebStore immediately after the initial sync starts.
To delete all your products we suggest you download a CSV with the optional “Add a column to delete products” box checked before performing the export. You‘ll simply need to add a “Y” in the delete column for all the products then upload your file into your MyDakis account, this will delete everything that has a “Y” value in the delete column.
If you’re not comfortable working with CSV files you can also clear the product categories one-by-one.
You can also take advantage of dakis’ Concierge Service; by using this service dakis will take care of setting up your inventory. To find out more contact sales@dakis.com or call us at 514-931-8820 x221.
Once your account is properly configured, go to the admin tab and click on Synchronization (left hand side). From here you can click on “Pull Lightspeed inventory to dakis” to initiate the sync; you can expect that the first sync can take up to 24 hours depending on the amount of products you’re sending to MyDakis.
Every item in your Lightspeed Retail POS inventory will send the following information over to MyDakis.
| What Lightspeed sends | What MyDakis does with it |
| UPC | MyDakis will look for a match inside the WebPIM, if there is a match the product associated with this UPC will be made available in your inventory. |
| Custom SKU | This value will be assigned as the product’s SKU. Without an assigned SKU the products will not sync between Lightspeed and MyDakis. A SKU is critical to a successful sync. |
| MSRP | This value will be assigned as the product’s price field in MyDakis |
| Default Price | This value will be assigned as the product’s Sales Price field in MyDakis |
| Quantity | This value will be assigned as the product’s quantity. |
5 - After sync procedures
If you have successfully synced your Lightspeed items with MyDakis and notice that certain items aren’t behaving as they should you may have to configure some settings for your products. Updating some or all of your products in MyDakis may sound like a heavy task but if you get familiar with the inventory CSV download/upload procedures you can accomplish most of the required tasks in very little time.
Click here to see a list of post-sync cases and solutions.
If you have tried solving any of these issues and can’t resolve them, contact support@dakis.com for assistance.
TIPS AND TRICKS
Dakis offers their Concierge Service which can greatly help you setup and maintain your Automated Smart Store; we can do most of the work for you inside of a reasonable time frame.
If you’re interested in finding out more about The Concierge Service please contact sales@dakis.com or call 514-931-8820 x221.
6 - Items that have not synced
These are the steps you can take to add the remaining items to your inventory. Items that are missing their UPC in Lightspeed or MyDakis will not be added automatically to your inventory via sync. You can chose between adding the reaming items manually or letting the items add and update themselves over time as you add more information in to you Lightspeed account.
OPTION 1 : Manually add remaining items
If your goal is to make sure that the most amount of products are active and synced on your website as soon as possible, you can try adding the remaining non-synced items manually.
- In MyDakis, search for items by product name, add them to your inventory and input the SKU found in Lightspeed.
- On next sync, item information will be pulled up from Lightspeed, since the SKUs exist in both Lightspeed and MyDakis a sync will be possible. Prices and quantities will be added to the newly synced items.
TIPS AND TRICKS
Instead of searching through the remaining products while in the inventory section of your MyDakis account, try searching for products in the WEBPIM instead. If found in the WebPIM, you’ll get information such as what category the product belongs to, facilitating your search.
OPTION 2 : Add new items as you receive them after initial sync
If you’re satisfied with your initial inventory sync and are happy with having new items added to your inventory as you receive new shipments of products you should simply proceed by adding the new items to your inventory, thus periodically adding UPCs to pre-existing and new inventory in Lightspeed in the process.
Eventually your newer items will sync between Lightspeed and MyDakis in real time; the dakis product integration team is always adding UPCs to new items, as well as assigning missing UPCs to older pre-existing items in our WEBPIM. With the addition of new products paired with their UPCs and the addition of UPCs to old products you’ll notice that more and more items will activate and sync automatically between your MyDakis account and your Lightspeed Retail POS.
7 - Place some test orders!
Now that you’re all setup it’s time to place some test orders to make sure everything is in working order, make sure that the following tasks are completing:
- Orders are making their way into Lightspeed
- Quantities are updating
- Zero quantity behavior is set
- New products are being activated
- Prices are accurate
- That changes are accurately listed in the sync reports
Congratulations! You should be well on your way to having that automated smart store you’ve always dreamed; Lightspeed and MyDakis will be sending information back and forth to each other in real time allowing you the freedom to focus on other tasks. If you require further assistance please reach out to support@dakis.com.
If you would like to get started with your MyDakis and Lightspeed sync please contact sales@dakis.com or call 514-931-8820 x221