Regular inventory maintenance on ICMP contributes to a successful selling experience. When inventory is properly maintained, there are fewer misunderstandings between buyers and sellers, a reduced chance of duplicate orders, and fewer rejected orders. Inventory updates should be made frequently to avoid any of these problems.
If sellers are not available to answer inquiries, process orders or ship items for more than two days, ICMP requires sellers to use the "Vacation" program. While in "Vacation" status, inventory is temporarily removed from the ICMP Web sites and member information in the "stores" tab indicates that the seller is unavailable to fill orders.
Sellers are required to update their inventory frequently to ensure orders are not received for posters that may have been sold elsewhere. The frequency of updating is dependent upon the number of posters, the average number of posters sold per day, and the number of other marketplaces in which each seller participates. We recommend sellers use incremental updates at least once a day if listing through several venues, or if sales are made through a brick-and-mortar store. ICMP automatically removes items from the online inventory as soon as they are sold through our Web sites. Sellers must also mark items as sold in their own inventory management software. If posters are not marked as sold, they may re-appear on our Web sites after the next upload. Sold listings in seller's inventory management programs should not be deleted without first being marked as sold and uploaded to ICMP.
Purging is not to be used as a method of inventory management; rather it is a feature to be utilized on a periodic basis (every 3 or 4 months) to ensure the inventory in your system is synchronized with the ICMP online inventory. Files processed with a purge request take much longer to process than incremental update files and can negatively impact order fulfillment in our seller programs. An incremental update file contains only recently changed (added, updated or sold) posters, requires less processing time and therefore ensures that seller inventories are updated on ICMP' Web sites as well as those of our Resellers as quickly as possible.
ICMP can provide a custom conversion for the following inventory management software. We can also assist you in converting your current records for import into our own PosterBase inventory management program.
Sellers are responsible for maintaining a current backup copy of their inventory on their own computer. ICMP is not responsible for lost or inaccurate information. Sellers should not rely on the ability to download their inventory from ICMP' Web site as a method for recovering a backup copy of their data. Upon upload, the data is converted from its original format to ICMP format and some information (such as location and the price originally paid for a poster) is not stored in our system. Sellers also cannot download their sold posters from our Web site.