System	Store	User	Password
				Sign in

X-Margin

As the name suggests, X-Margin is all about controlling and generating margin for furniture stores. Literally taking 10's of thousands of prices and manipulating them quickly, efficiently and accurately to a degree not usually undertaken by any store.

A few percent here and there can make a terrific difference on your final achieved margin. It's not all about discount to consumers it's about having the tools on-hand to generate instant instore 'Events' and promotions in a very controlled way.

All systems have been written with ease of use in mind with the ability to export information directly into many other furniture systems and web sites allowing for a single entry-point of data without time consuming duplication.

These systems are based upon other systems written by the same author that have also be used by furniture retailers for nearly 20 years. With the amount of control these systems offer it has been proved that achieved margin does increase and actually makes a notable difference of several percent.

Notes

Systems requirements Microsoft Explorer V6.0+
Several system features simply will not work with other browsers.

X-Margin opens in a new window. If this does not appear then please check your popup blocker.

General:
The demonstration database has lots of sample data where other users have uploaded and manipulated the data in testing the systems. All prices are random figures and any changes that you make could literally be changed again by another user within a few seconds.

If you were to become a subscriber to these systems then you would have your own private database that only you and your selected staff could access.

User comments

John Casey
X Margin is excellent for ensuring that the pricing structure for the business is accurate and that the margin on every item can be easily monitored & controlled to ensure it is in line with expectations, despite having in excess of 250,000 items to manage

Re-pricing supplier catalogues is handled by a few clicks and is extremely fast.

X Margin is a very user friendly system and all staff found it very easy to pick up irrespective of the levels of computer skills they possessed.

Staff are very comfortable using the software and more importantly trust the accuracy of the data contained therein.

X Margin is excellent value for money when you consider all the benefits we as a retailer get from the system.

Hills
We are able to upload from members.net a suppliers complete file including prices, sizes and pictures in about 3 minutes, and within a total of 15 minutes your margin for usual, and sale price is completely finished. Debranding is simple and A4 handout price lists can be produced easily for consumers. We are able to make sale prices effective for all suppliers in seconds which gives us total control, and consistency across our sales team on prices.

We also find it easy to upload onto the system any non AIS supplier files.

Although we are not using the system to its full potential this doesn't matter as you can pick and choose whichever features best benefit your company. We are still learning things all the time but certainly would not look back as time is money and this system certainly saves you that.

Price 'Rounding'

Who does your price 'Rounding' in your store, the buyer, director, salesperson or your computer system?

The buyer or director rarely rounds prices on every item available to the store, so this often falls onto the salesperson to round prices after calculating an event price on a non displayed or unpriced item.

Your Salesperson:
e.g. Calculated price with correct margin before rounding = 193, Salesperson rounds this off to 189. X-Margin would look at the price and perform all kinds of tests on it. But could simply round up instead of down, resulting in 199. This is instantly a difference of more than 5%. Multiply this across all orders that have been manually calculated and the figure is often staggering.

Your computer system:
Compare the logic that your computer system applies to price rounding and the flexibility of X-Margin. If you're setting and establishing a 'Usual' price X-Margin can apply totally different rules depending on the price band of the calculated price. Price rounding e.g. Suites upward in defined steps so that the price is always,

2149, 2199, 2249, 2299, 2349, 2399 etc

Ensuring that you always get the margin you asked for plus potentially an extra 50 pound, dollar or euro after rounding.

Pricing consistency

What can look really bad on your company is when a customer is quoted different prices for the same product by different sales people. Where a product isn't priced a sales person will often investigate and apply the 'Event' price which is going to be rounded or even calculated slightly differently to the next salesperson.

This is totally avoided by having your entire store available through some form of price lookup facility. This could be printed 'Event' price guides, computer 'Event' price lookup, even pocket screen e.g. iPod screen lookup. All of these facilities are available as standard through the online systems that are provided with X-Margin.