Manually downloading the deck
What is a deck download?
Good question. At one time, long long ago (circa 2003), warehouses used to give dealers a printout of the price and availability of all the goods available in their warehouse. In most warehouses, these printouts were called, oddly enough, decks. In RetailDeck, downloading the deck means to get an update of price and availability information from your buying group.
What is a manual deck download?
There are two ways to download the deck, automatically and manually. As its name would imply, an automatic deck download happens without you, the user, doing anything. For example, you can configure RetailDeck to download the deck every time you start your computer, or at 3:13 AM every morning. However, at any time that you like, you can update your data by going to the welcome screen and clicking the "Download data from ..." button.
The rest of this tutorial walks you through this process step by step, and also explains some of the finer points.
Tutorial
If you have not already done so, you should start RetailDeck by double clicking the RetailDeck icon on the desktop.
As long you have run RetailDeck before, a splash screen will appear as RetailDeck loads its previously stored data. If you have never used RetailDeck on this computer before, you should read the tutorial that specifically deals with running RetailDeck for the first time, and come back to this tutorial later.
After a few moments, RetailDeck will have read all of its stored data and the Welcome Screen will appear. To manually update our data, we are going to click on the "Download data from ..." button. Before we do this, however, notice the second button, the one whose text reads "Search the inventory as it stood on Sat Sep 18 00:30:50 GMT 2004". The text on this button tells us exactly when the inventory information was last updated. If you rely on automatic deck downloads most of the time, you should make sure that the time of the last update is recent, certianly within the last twenty four hours. If the date shown for the last inventory update is more than twenty four hours old, you should try a manual update. It may be that the automatic updates are failing for some reason (such as an invalid username or password, or a malfunctioning internet connection), and your inventory information is not getting updated properly.
After you click on the "Doanload data from ..." button, the password screen will be displayed. RetailDeck remebers your username and password from the last time that you downloaded the deck. Ordinarly, you can just click the "Download the current inventory from XYZ ..." button without making any changes. If your username or password gets changed, for some reason, you can use this screen to enter your new password into RetailDeck.
After clicking on the download button, RetailDeck will begin to download inventory information. This will often be very quick, however, when new rebate forms come out, or when manufacturers introduce new models, this download may take longer as RetailDeck downloads the new rebate forms or product data.
Once the download has completed, RetailDeck must perform a series of quick processing steps. During these steps, progress dialogs will pop up to show RetailDeck's progress.
After RetailDeck has processed all of the newly downloaded information, the Search Screen will display. For more information on how to search the inventory, see the tutoral on searching the inventory.
