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Auto-sort Etilize results by price, from lowest to highest

It would be extremely helpful to be able to sort Etilize search results by price.  It would be best to default the display of results to be from lowest price to highest price.  As results show up from backend connections to distributors, the results would update and re-sort.  Or, there could be a refresh button to update the list sorting after new results have populated.


What happens if you have 50 results? Should QW go and get the results from all 50 products, from a raft of distributors..? this would take some minutes.


Are you aware some information on List Price is displayed, which you can then sort? That would, very quickly, get you in the right sort of ball park costwise.

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Hi Matt, I'll try and respond as best I can.  I'll mention that I first posed this question to support and they suggested I create a feature request for it.


I'll also point out, that as far as I can tell, the point or use case of Etilize is to find a product SKU for the cheapest price, would you agree?  Etilize also has to be better and faster than manually logging in to several distributor websites and pasting in the SKU by hand to see the prices and compare prices by hand.  Considering one can manually log in to TechData, CDW, etc and paste a SKU to see the price, which can be done relatively quickly, but is very manual -- I could check several distributors manually in under a few minutes by hand.  So.... In order to provide value, Etilize needs to be even faster/better than my going to each of my handful of distributors sites manually right?  So let's keep this in mind as the basis for exploring these suggested features.


Back to the point of this request, here is an example search in QuoteWerks Web, no prices are shown whatsoever.  Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I don't see a way to display prices in the list of results.

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One can click each result to see the price, but this is extremely inefficient, and one would not likely find any e-commerce or shopping experience where you have to click each result to see its price.


If I perform the search on QW Desktop, no prices are displayed (likely for a different reason):

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Perhaps there are good reasons for no prices being displayed at all, but it is what it is no prices.  As a result, zooming out, from the customers experience perspective I'm not saving anytime here, software is not doing work for me or achieving outcomes.  I would not have employee's shop for products using QuoteWerks, I'd be embarrassed advocating for using it and I wouldn't opt to buy more licenses of realtime module or Etilize.  I want to change that.


What I see that needs to change, which may partially be a training issue for myself and may partially be needed features is:

  • Firstly, the ability to have the product go pull in prices for all the results, even if this takes a long time, I'm happy to do something else while I wait.  If there is rationale this can't be done because "what if someone has 10,000 results, we can't possibly pull in prices for all those", then make a limit that it will only pull in 100 when the new pull-all-prices feature is triggered, or the limit can be set by the user.
  • Secondly, the ability to sort the results by price (I'll wait however long it takes, I'll work on something else while I wait)


Lastly, when I try the Elitebook example, and other test searches I run into an issue where the prices are $0.0 after I manually click the button to pull in the prices for the specific search result line.

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Again, maybe good reason that so many results have $0.0, but again this type of issue makes it so its faster to skip Etilize and Real-time module and just manually search on Tech Data, Synnex and a few others, compare prices and make a decision.  This takes several minutes or longer manually going to distributor websites and is work I'd like to speed up, but QuoteWerks is not successfully speeding it up -- again, that may be the fault of Synnex or some other external reason but it is what it is, I'm not able to derive value from using Etilize/Realtime.


Back to my feature requests, in the code that allows one to pull in prices for all results should be a filter that filters out all results of $0.0 cost, this would eliminate all these junk entries that clog things up and further negate the value the product could otherwise deliver.


"What happens if you have 50 results? Should QW go and get the results from all 50 products, from a raft of distributors..? this would take some minutes."

I'm not sure I understand the relevance of this point.  I'm not asking or suggesting that QuoteWerks retrieve any more information from distributors than it already is.  Exception is my being able to ask QuoteWerks to retrieve all prices for the results in the list with one click rather than my having to open each result individually to get its price, flying blind as to whether the result is worth a click.  I'm also not suggesting that QuoteWerks pull from more distributors than it already is.  You used the number of 50, if it would have pulled from 50 before my feature request, it would pull from 50 after my feature request.


My goal here is to improve things for myself and others, and give honest feedback so I can learn or potentially QuoteWerks can improve if there are improvements to be made, and be more successful and attract even more customers.  I hope this feedback is helpful.


Chris

Hey Chris,


Thanks for the detail - most useful to the dev. team I'm sure!

I'll qualify this in that we're all on the same team; I hope I'm not coming across as defensive or that the idea you have is a bad one.


I would agree that one purpose of Etilize is to find an item at the cheapest price.

Most of my clients know roughly what they're looking for, get the results and then get the pricing/availability - this is far quicker, in my experience, than going to each individual disti website.


QuoteWerks is doing two things here.

  • It's getting product content via Etilize (descriptions/images/options, etc.)
  • It's getting pricing and availability (not via Etilize, Etilize doesn't have this information)


The 'List High' and 'List Low' values are only made available by some distributors - some manufacturers are better than others at showing this sort of information. I don't think QW can do anything on this, as the information is simply not available. This information does not come from Etilize.


I think the phrase "I'll do something else, whilst I wait" is an interesting one - would most people wait?

My use of the number 50 is intentional, QW never returns more than 50 results at a time. If I search for something generic like "Printer" it will know there are xxxx results, but will only show 50.


Now, let's say I have 5 distributors that stock that item and can give me a price. That's 250 prices and availability it needs to give me. Let's say it takes 1 second per price, that's 4 minutes of waiting. That's a long time.


QuoteWerks returns me 50 items, in that list I'm interested in 2 of them - we're now talking 10 seconds. I doubt I could get 10 prices in 10 seconds in 10 browser tabs.


I agree that the discontinued/not found messages are an annoyance - there is the ability to exclude items from future results, but that doesn't help in the short term. Perhaps each individual QW could somehow feedback to a master database that items are discontinued and should therefore not show for any other QW user - this sounds complex though!


Perhaps the dev. team could add a button to "Get all pricing" for the results we have? This would then give the ability to quickly dive in to one or two products, or (giving it the appropriate time) the whole lot of results.


Totally agree with your last paragraph, I feel the same.

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