TARGET Sales Management System

TARGET Sales Management System - Application Notes

TARGET<-->UEN Interface

Your TARGET system includes a completely automated interface to the UEN database. This makes it easy to keep your UEN listings up to date without additional effort. Since UEN also generates your web site inventory, this is even more important.

TARGET->UEN Update

To update UEN from your TARGET system (assuming you have an Internet connection available to your TARGET system) you just go to the Back Office, select choice 77 (UEN Access), then select choice 11. Your TARGET system will connect to UEN and exchange information on listing status. Any new or modified listing will be sent to UEN and any listing that should be removed will be. Pictures, specifications and movies will be updated based on the settings of the controls below.

Overall Controls

The principal control of the updating process is carried by the system control variable UENTCP. The data for this control variable consists of a sequence of five Y/N choices. These are defined as follows:

Must be Y to allow updating
Y=send pictures, N=don't send pictures
Y=send specifications, N=don't
Y=send movies, N=don't
Y=send prices, N=don't

Note that prices are never shown on UEN. We provide for sending prices for two reasons. First, if you participate in listing sharing with other dealers, this allows them to pick up your price at the same time as the listing text, picture and specification. Second, your web site controls may be set to display prices on the detail pages.

Control of Individual Listings

Listings of types I,S,K,W are eligible for transmission to UEN as long as they represent used (as opposed to new) equipment. A listing will be put on UEN as long as it meets these criteria and is coded with the octothorpe ("#") character in the advertising code field. If a listing is modified on the TARGET system after it has been sent to UEN it will be automatically updated the next time TARGET connects to UEN.

If a listing is currently on UEN, it may be removed simply by removing the "#" character. Note that this is not necessary if the listing is to be removed because the item was sold or scrapped. This is because these operations change the machine type to B or Z and these types are not eligible for UEN.

If the control flags are set to allow this, a picture, specification, or movie will be sent automatically if the last modification date is later than the date of the item on UEN or if it does not exist on UEN. This means that if you replace a picture on your TARGET system and then connect to UEN, the picture will be updated automatically on UEN.

Other Listing Controls

HSI has reserved the advertising codes "!", "@", "#", "$", "%" for use with the UEN system. The use of the "#" is discussed above. The "!" (exclaimation point) code is used to control the appearance of a machine on the "specials" or "what's new" page on your web site. More detail is available on the web site help page but the brief story is that you set the "!" code in addition to the "#" for any item you wish to appear on the special page.

Category Problems

UEN strictly enforces the UED category system; UED serves as the controlling authority for the category system used by the major publications. As a result of changes to the category system over the years, there are some TARGET systems which still have listings in obsolete categories.

Since these listings could not be displayed on UEN, if the TARGET system attempts to send one to UEN, UEN will reject it with a message. In this case, you should use UEN to find the proper current category (or call UED to ask them) and move the listing in question to the proper category.