Ordering with Inventory Express
- Bee Bornheimer
Creating initial Bib and Order Records with Inventory Express
Choose Place Orders from the Function drop-down list.
Click the New button on the toolbar.
Select your desired template for creating a new bib record
At the ISBN prompt, enter the ISBN for the title
Make sure the box for Search by Inventory Express is checked, next to the Amazon logo.
Hit Go!
To view a record in the results, highlight it and click the View button. When you are finished viewing the record, click the Back to Browse button to return to the results screen.
After you chose which record you want to use for ordering, highlight its entry and click the Select button. If you do not want to use any of the records in the results list, click the Continue button to continue on with entering the new record or Cancel to cancel the new record creation altogether.
After selecting a bibliographic record to add to the database, Sierra takes you directly into keying the order record. (Note: you will need to make sure that you have the Sierra setting that automatically creates new order records when you create new bib records)
Note that the system automatically copies the vendor's list price into the order record's EPRICE fixed-length field.
So - in summary, really all Inventory Express is doing is taking whatever ISBN you enter, searching Amazon, and copying over very basic bibliographic info, as well as the estimated price from the Amazon product page. It does not actually place the order.
When Placing the Order on Amazon
In order to keep the integration between Sierra and Amazon active, Amazon needs some way to track that this tool is generating purchases. So we have been asked when placing Amazon orders to append the following text to the product page URLs for the items that you are ordering from Amazon. An example URL would look like this:
This is something they plan to integrate in to the Sierra software in a future release (ie, a link directly from Sierra to an Amazon product with the tracking code already included) but for now it will need to be added manually.