Getting Started ABCs with ChannelOnline

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Things that need to be in place to start conducting business through ChannelOnline.

Prerequisites

You will need to gather the following information to complete the setup:

• Supplier account login & password (see Supplier Setup Instructions).
• Names of the Users and Administrators who will be using the system (Personnel).
• The pricing model(s) you wish to use, i.e., markup (points), margin (percent), or discount off list.
• The state(s) in which your company is required to collect taxes.
• The shipping methods and charges your company supports.
• Payment methods and terms you wish to support (credit cards, P.O. numbers, credit limits, leasing, and others).
• Your company logo in GIF or JPG format to be placed on your documents and/or store (200w x 150h pixels).
• The legal disclaimer you would like to appear on your Quotes and/or Orders, and/or Carts.

Getting Logged In

You should have been sent an email containing a link to create your ChannelOnline password. The first step is to click on the link and create a password
that meets industry standard complexity requirements:

• Your password must be at least 8 characters (and no greater than 20).
• Your password must have at least one upper-case letter.
• Your password must have at least one lower-case letter.
• Your password must have at least one number.

If you did not receive any emails from us after you purchased your ChannelOnline account, please reach out to our support team immediately at: cs-col-support@1worldsync.com.

If you have forgotten your password or simply wish to change it, navigate to your ChannelOnline log-in page and click the “Forgot Password” link.

Your ChannelOnline account URL will be formatted like: https://{market}.channelonline.com/acount-name

Your market is determined by the country in which you are located. “usm” is used for U.S.-based accounts, and “cam” for Canadian-based accounts. Your
account name, or “shortcut”, was determined by whoever initially created your account.

Basic Steps:

• Set up your Supplier Account(s)
• Set up your Price Profile(s)
• Set up your Catalog
• Tax Profiles
• Payment Options & Delivery Methods
• Company Defaults (Documents and Messaging)
• Set up Personnel Users (Administrators, Sales Team, and Purchasers)
• Create a customer Account

Starting Your Catalog

What an end customer sees for products and pricing requires three things in ChannelOnline.

• Supplier products (Supported and/or Custom)
• Catalog filter rules (Catalog)
• Pricing filter rules (Price Profile)

Suppliers

In order to view product data, pricing, and real-time availability from supported suppliers in ChannelOnline, you must enter your specific supplier account information for each supplier in their respective Supplier Account Settings page, under the ADMIN menu. For your reference, please review our ‘Setting Up Supported Suppliers‘ user guide.

Location in Control Panel: Admin > Suppliers

To expedite the use of ChannelOnline, set up the supported suppliers from which products are sourced and purchased. Supported suppliers are directly integrated with services like product and price feeds, electronic ordering, and real-time price and availability look-ups in your quotes, sales orders, and purchase orders. Not all services are available from all suppliers. However, most supported suppliers provide daily price file support, which means we can download that supplier's catalog daily to refresh our products and pricing for those products.

Depending on the supplier, you may need to configure up to three different account types with each supplier ,depending on which services they offer:

• FTP Account- This account setup will allow ChannelOnline to download your product and pricing catalog from that supplier. You may also be required to provide an FTP path and or file name depending on the supplier.
• XML Account- This account will generally control access to real-time price/availability as well as electronic PO submission. Please note that not all suppliers provide this level of service.
• Web Account- This account will be used by some suppliers to obtain access to real-time price and availability.

After you have entered your supplier account information, ChannelOnline will attempt to download and update that supplier’s catalog once per day. The complete process will take approximately 24 to 48 hours before product data starts appearing in your ChannelOnline account under the Products tab. If any supplier account information was incorrectly entered, OR if your supplier price file is not in the proper format, then no product data will appear for that supplier until after the problem has been corrected. Please contact cs-col-support@1worldsync.com if you are experiencing these types of issues.

Note: To import custom suppliers or to create custom items, see the Import / Export section in the Help Center.

Price Profiles

Price Profiles allow you to manage different pricing schemes, or sets of rules, for your customers.

Location: Admin -> Pricing

ChannelOnline comes with a default Price Profile, called 25% Markup, and it will be used for all customer and prospect creation. This profile cannot be deleted but can be edited, or additional profiles can be created and assigned. Each customer or storesite can be assigned to one price profile or price tier (optional) at a time. To create a new profile:

1. Use the “Create New Profile” button to create a new price profile. You will be prompted to specify the following information:
2. On Page 1:
   • Profile Name – The name of this price profile. Be as descriptive as possible.
   • Active Suppliers – This determines which suppliers’ products will be available in this profile.
   • Base Cost Selection – This determines which supplier cost to base the customer's price rules on.
   • Gov / Edu Selection – Determines what kind of customers this price profile will be used for.
   • Contract Pricing – Determines if contract pricing can be shown in this profile
3. On Page 2:
   • Rounding – Round your customer prices up or down to the nearest whole dollar.
   • Never Exceed List – This will prevent the price profile from pricing any products above the list price when the list price is available.
   • Never Below Cost – This will prevent any discount rules from dropping the price below your supplier cost.
   • Allow Zero Price – Allows your sales team to give items away in your quotes by zeroing out the price.

Pricing rules are available for part numbers, categories, and manufacturers, plus unique rules from selected attributes (Items Admin > Rules) or tags (Company Settings > Manage Tags). If no pricing rules are met by these four rule types, then the global rate and method are used.
To add a new pricing rule:

• Click the “Add New Rules” button above the rule section you want to add to
• For “Category / Manufacturer Pricing Rules”, enter the part number, category, or manufacturer name
• Provide a rate and method. For example, a rate of “10” and a method of “discount” will add a “10% discount off list” rule for that product or group of products.
• Follow a similar process to add “Attribute / Tag Rules” and “Part Number Pricing Rules”.

Periodically click save while working; once all rules are created, click the Save and Exit button.

Note: There is a training video available for price profiles.

Catalog

Catalog Admin

Location: Admin -> Catalog Admin

Create new catalogs, edit existing catalogs, view existing catalog details, view customers assigned to the catalog, and save up to 5 catalogs as your “My Catalogs”. The “My Catalogs” will appear above “Recent Customers” in the left decor of the system for quick access.

By default, ChannelOnline creates a Full Catalog (also called Company Default Catalog) where it looks to place all imported products from suppliers. This catalog is also assigned to all customer and prospect accounts on creation. It is not necessary to create another catalog if all customers can view the same list of products. If you choose to create custom catalogs, you will be able to build them by including items or by starting with the full catalog and excluding items from it.

Tax Profile

Location: Admin -> Tax Profile

Tax Profile options can be set for all U.S. states, U.S. territories, the Armed Forces, and Canadian provinces. Because tax laws vary by state and country, ChannelOnline encourages resellers to consult a tax attorney to verify the legality of their tax profiles.
Note: that some states tax freight, and ChannelOnline will automatically tax freight in those states by default.  Service items will be taxed with service rates only when they are of the service item type.

Establish tax preferences:

• Choose the state in which you would like to edit your tax settings by clicking on the edit icon.
• Select whether the state should be Taxed or Not Taxed by checking the corresponding checkbox.
• For taxed states, choose the Tax Collection Method to be used from the drop-down.
• Select whether Freight and Service should be taxed for that state by using the appropriate checkboxes.
• If you choose the “Nexus Location” method, then you must also enter both the Nexus City and Nexus Zip code.

Click the “Save” link to commit your changes.

E-waste / Environmental Fees:

• If you do business in states or provinces that apply e-waste fees, enable that checkbox at he bottom of the page.  The setting will automatically save when you navigate away from the page.

TIP: It’s typically a good idea to enable the option: [ ] Re-apply price profile rules and update tax rates when a quote is copied. Turning on this feature will force ChannelOnline to re-query the price profile rules for all products on a quote when it gets copied from one customer to another.

Payment Options

Location: Admin -> Payment Options
Payment options determine how customers can pay for products and services. To enable a payment option, simply place a check in the box to the left of the option. Some options require configuration to make them work; select the “Edit” link to configure.
Note: Purchase Order terms can be set at the account level via the Edit settings icon.

Delivery Methods

Location: Admin -> Delivery Methods
Configure which shipping options will be available throughout ChannelOnline for accounts, documents, and storesites.

• Place checks in the boxes of the shipment options you wish to have available to your customers.
• If a delivery method you require does not exist in the list, use the “Add Custom Delivery Method” link to create it.
• You will also want to establish a default shipping method, which will place that option first in the list on any orders or shopping carts at purchase time.
• Choose whether or not to configure per-customer shipping rules, or have all customers use the rules configured here. If you choose the per-customer option, a new shipping tab will appear on your “Edit Customer” pages.
  Note: Additional options are available but not addressed here.

ChannelOnline will attempt to calculate a shipping estimate for quotes and store-placed shopping carts based on supplier weight, package dimensions, and delivery address.
Note: Shipping price on your quotes and shopping carts is only an estimate. The actual shipping charge is calculated during the purchase order process for your supplier. To understand how shipping is determined, click here. 

Company Settings

Location: Admin -> Company Settings

Key settings that need to be in place prior to sending a quote. The Company Settings page controls a variety of company-wide behaviors for your business in ChannelOnline. Here we are covering only the basics.

• Confirm your Company Details are correct for your business. Make sure to review the default contacts, billing, and shipping addresses.
• Set up your company logo in the Documents section under Misc. This logo will appear as the default logo on all of your printed documents (this can be later modified in the Document Templates section). Your logo should be exactly 200w X 150h pixels to avoid any distortion on your documents.
• Determine key document behavior for quotes, sales, invoices, RMAs, and purchase order documents in the Documents section. Important fields:
  • How long before a quote expires?
  • Document numbering, use of prefix or suffix.
  • Display Profit columns (margin, mark up, and discount %) on Line Items for internal views.
  • Allow for the creation of Invoices and RMAs.
• Set up your document messaging, such as legal disclaimers, in the Messaging section.

Note: It is not necessary to determine every option on setup, but return to this page in the future to change the behavior of certain functionality globally across your business.

Personnel

Location: Admin -> Personnel
Manage ChannelOnline users, access rights, permissions, and employees. The pages in this section that need to begin managing personnel are:

• Personnel – From here, you can create new user accounts if you have the licensing for it. You may also view, edit, and delete existing users if you have the permissions to perform those actions.
• Access Rights Profiles – These are your security groups. Each Access Rights Profile contains a list of actions that members of that profile can perform when using ChannelOnline.
• Groups – Groups are a way to combine multiple users into a team. For example, a West Coast sales team and an East Coast sales team could each have their own group. Each user account can control which customers, documents, and price profiles are shared with the other members of the group, as well as what level of control others can have.

Managing Access Rights and Security Permissions

ChannelOnline provides a list of built-in access rights profiles, which you can think of as roles within your organization. Often, the default access rights profiles are sufficient to get started, but if needed, new access rights profiles from scratch or by copying an existing profile. The profile rights themselves are broken into logical segments. Each option was written to be self-explanatory based on its description. Contact support if you require additional clarification.

Note: You cannot make changes to the built-in access rights profiles. You will need to create a new profile if you wish to make any changes to the options available to that profile.

User Groups and Permissions

Location: Admin -> Personnel

Users can be added to a single group of personnel (or Sales Team) members. Groups allow team members to easily share their customers, documents, and price profiles. Each user can control how other users access their data based on two factors:

• My Group – The group this rep is currently assigned to
• Other Groups – All other groups

Both “My Group” as well as “Other Groups” can further be given the following access permissions to a user’s customers, documents, and price profiles:

• Deny others access – Provides that group with no access to the specified information.
• Allow Read Only access – Allows members of that group to view but not change the specified information.
• Allow Read + Modify access – Grants the members of that group full access to the specified information.

NOTE: These permissions are important when setting up sales and support teams that need to be assigned to specific customers or geographic regions.

Adding a New Sales Rep

To create a sales rep, navigate to the Admin -> Personnel page and click the “Create New User” link. Be sure to configure the correct access rights profile and group for that user’s position within the organization. Then enter or select:

• Login ID – This must be an email address. A user will log into ChannelOnline using this as their username.
• Account Active? – Allows the account to be created, but leaves it disabled. Existing user accounts can be disabled using this feature if you have the proper access rights.
• Send e-mail notification – Will generate an email to the new user with a link to set up a password.

Employees:

For people needing to receive updates and communications regarding ChannelOnline, please add them as Employees within ChannelOnline. Employees do not require a license, but will receive maintenance and release updates. To add employees, use Create New User and select Employee (Read Only) as the access right profile.

Accounts

Location: Accounts

Accounts can be set up immediately, but will use the default Full Catalog and Price Profile unless others have been created. This may be done manually through the Accounts tab, or you may use the Import / Export Wizard found in Admin -> Import / Export section of ChannelOnline. The Import / Export Wizard supports DBF and ASCII tab-delimited file formats. You must have Admin rights to access the Import / Export Wizard.

Refer to the Accounts Import / Export section of the Help Center for more details.

Assistance and Training

I you need additional assistance in getting started, please contact the support team at cs-col-support@1worldsync.com, or sign up for a free weekly live training session. You can access the training schedule by clicking on the link labeled “Help Center” in the upper right corner of your ChannelOnline account and then selecting “Live Training.” There you will find the training schedule as well as several training and “How-To” video tutorials that you can watch on your own.

• Administration
• Quotes/Orders/POs/Customers
• Price Profiles
• Products Admin/Search Engine
• Storesite Admin/Storesite