Adventerra is an e-commerce company specializing in niche sports and outdoor gear. They have a presence on Amazon, and they also have a 3dCart page.
Keeping track of the inventory across these disparate sites proved to be difficult. Curtis Washington, the founder of Adventerra, asked me to build a reconciliation tool to read all of their inventory and alert their operations manager of any discrepencies.
My goal was to convey all of the relevant information on one page. This project gave me the opportunity to learn about Amazon's relatively straightforward API, as well as 3dcart's more esoteric system. I also had the chance to use some object oriented design concepts to keep everything organized.
The deliverable product was the website itself, as well as a daily email report using Amazon's Simple Email Service. This was almost entirely a backend project using PHP. The site itself is for internal use only, so I used basic HTML tables to present the data.
There were, as you may imagine, a few unexpected twists along the way. For a more in depth look at the code, read my blog post on it.
This was a successful project, and it has to date required very little maintenance from me since it was first delivered. Adventerra uses this tool every day; it has helped them to quickly find and address any problems.
With Nathan's help, we went from manually reconciling items across warehouses, fulfillment centers and multiple websites to a fully automated break reporting system. This upgrade reduced the time our company spends on reconciliation from about 2 hours a week to no more than 2 minutes per day.