If you're reading this guide you're either new to Timely and are adding your products for the first time, exciting times!! Or, you're adding some new products to use or sell to your customers (which is also awesome). Retail sales are often a crucial ingredient in growing your business. They are a great way to increase revenue, motivate staff, educate clients and extend the client's experience beyond the salon.
Whether you stock a boutique selection of products, a broad variety of ranges or brands, or you have your own retail line, managing your retail products in Timely is a breeze.
With Timely, you can easily add your retail products, sell them to clients on their own or with appointments, manage stock levels and track product (and staff) performance.
In this guide, we'll show you how to:
This feature may not be available, or may look different on your current plan. Find out how to upgrade in our How to change your Timely plan guide.
Add a retail product
Want to add your professional stock to Timely? Check out our How to manage professional stock guide.
- Head to Setup > Products from the main menu.
- Click the green New product button and select New retail product:
- Enter a product Name, SKU/Handle, Barcode and a Description. The definitions for SKU, Handle and Barcode for a product are as follows:
SKU (Stock keeping unit) - This is a unique product code you can come up for you and your staff to track products within your business. Eg: SKU for a Loreal 100ml Shampoo can be: 'LORSHMP100ml'
Handle: The product identifier section of the product URL of the products' web page. Below is an example of a URL of a product in a shopify website. The underlined section in the example below is the identifier which is also known as the product handle. Instead of storing the SKU you can store the handle so that you can find the product in your website using this field.
Barcode: Also known as the Universal Product Code(UPC), this is the barcode printed in each product which varies from one product variant to another and in most cases a unique code globally containing 8-14 digits. Below image is an example of a product barcode. The 13 digit code beneath the barcode (9416050543014) should be typed or scanned using a barcode scanner into the barcode field when adding a product. If any of your products don’t have a barcode printed in the packaging, you can leave the ‘Barcode' field empty or you can generate a unique barcode from a free online barcode generator website to fill this field. Once you generate the barcode you can print it and paste on the product for scanning.
Below is an example of a correctly filled product example containing the codes described above.
- Add a Cost price (the cost to you as the business) and the retail Price.
- Select a Tax rate (if required) from the drop-down list and determine if the Price includes tax:
If this is unchecked, we will add tax on top of the listed price when the product is added to invoices.
- Scroll down to the Photo section. Use the Upload new photo button to attach an image to the product:
- Once the image is added, you can click Save to complete the process:
- Or, continue on to set the stock level (see below).
Set the stock level and alerts
You can set a stock level for a product, to track the stock going in and out of your business. We'll keep a record of any stock adjustments in the History section, so you can easily see when stock has been added an removed.
- Scroll to the Stock level section. You will see a stock level for that product at each of your locations. By default, these are set to Unlimited:
- To add stock, click the [+] next to the location:
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Enter how many you want to Add and select a Reason from the list. Click Add to update the stock level:
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To remove stock, click the [-] next to the location:
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Enter how many you want to Remove and select a Reason from the list. Click Remove to update the stock level:
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To set an alert for the product, enter a number in the Alert field:
When your stock level reaches that number, we will alert you via a notification. - Check the box next to "Allow product to be sold even when out of stock" if you would like to be able to sell your product when there are none in the system.
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Check the box next to Send emails when available stock reaches the alert limit to send an email:
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When you're ready, click Save to apply.
- If you ever need to edit your product details, you can do this by clicking the three dots next to the product, and clicking edit.