Earlier this year, AQ introduced a live, topic-specific webinar series to educate our customers on how to better utilize AQ, introduce new products, solutions and services and gather feedback to provide customers with the information they need to optimize the value of AQ. Recently, AQ’s Content Team hosted a webinar presenting information and best practices for manufacturers to expedite the price update submission process. More than 125 customers joined the webinar and since our team was not able to address all the inquiries submitted during the webinar we wanted to make sure we provided answers as we quickly approach the end of the year and your company prepares to update for 2020.
The next webinar is on Tues., Nov. 12, when the product development and media teams will introduce the AQ Designer Plug-In for Autodesk Revit, the newest addition to the AQ Design Solutions suite. If you have a topic idea, we would love to hear it! You can submit your feedback or any questions about the webinar series to marketing@aqnet.com.
Webinar Q & A
Q: I have two product lines that update at different times of the year. Can I have two effective dates?
A: The AQ platform supports one effective date per manufacturer. In this instance, your effective date would be the most recent date.
Q: I plan on updating pricing a percentage across the board. Do I still need to provide you with all the pricing or just the percentage?
A: You only need to send us the percentage you’d like added to your products plus any information regarding rounding up/down. We’ll do the rest and provide you with a report to review and confirm.
Q: Can we send a percentage update for most of our products and send an excel file separately for products that do not fall under the percentage update?
A: To expedite the process, the preference is to keep everything in one file. We can provide specific data columns to you which may aid in understanding what gets a percentage increase and what does not such as:
|
Model |
Category |
Brand |
List Price |
Q: What's the cost for AQ Insight?
A: There are two service plans available for AQ Insight: Basic and Pro. The Basic plan is available to publishing manufacturers at no cost and provides category-level data. The Pro plan will provide additional model–level data giving you a deeper dive into how specific products are performing in AQ and across channels. We’ll be in touch with more information in early 2020.
Q: How soon can we get a spreadsheet to update our pricing?
A: Your Content liaison can provide you with the pre-populated spreadsheet within 24-48 hours of your request.
Q: Can AQ hold a "Ghost" part number that relates to a SKU code, often enough our SKU codes mean nothing to customers, but we can generate part codes that make sense to them to simplify quote creation.
A: Yes. AQ supports what we call an “Internal Model” field. When searched in AQ the results return the actual model number.
Q: Is it okay to alter the model numbers (e.g., insert or delete hyphens) you provide in your spreadsheet to match our download so that we can use the VLOOKUP feature in Excel?
A: Please do not alter the model numbers on the pre-populated spreadsheet. Instead, insert an additional column, copy the model numbers to the new column and alter those model numbers for use with VLOOKUP. If you would like us to change the current AQ models to your new models with/without hyphen, please let us know.
Q: Are multiple price updates possible throughout the year?
A: Absolutely. Some manufacturers require multiple updates throughout the year, especially due to material cost increases or tariffs.
Q: Most of my customers required a 90-day notice for price increases - should I notify AQ when I notify my customers?
A: Yes! We would LOVE if you notified us at the same time. However, we only require the actual pricing update information 3-4 weeks in advance.
Q: We have an entire line staying at 2019 pricing. Do I need to provide a separate list, or can we just answer that from the variance report?
A: Please notify your content liaison which product line will be staying at 2019 pricing, so we don’t zero out the pricing on those items. However, they will most definitely come up on the variance report if you forget to do so.
Q: How many different price breaks can we have?
A: We can list multiple price breaks. For example: 1 to 4 is XX price, 5 to 10 pieces is XX price, 11 to 20 is XX price, etc. Please note, those price breaks will be seen by all AQ users.
Q: Is the product weight SHIP or NET weight?
A: The product weight listed in AQ is SHIP weight.
Q: Can we get an excel price list for other vendors?
A: We take the privacy of our customers very seriously and only provide manufacturers with their own specific information.
Q: Is there a fee to utilize the pre-populated spreadsheet for an increase?
A: There is no fee for the pre-populated spreadsheet for a price increase.
Q: When do the majority of manufacturers send their new Price List for early January launch?
A: Most manufacturers adhere to the timeline and submit their new price list by December 1.
Q: Can we change the display order of our products in the catalog?
A: AQ publishes products in alpha – numeric order only.
Q: Can we get the specification detail on our items so that we can confirm this data is accurate?
A: We do not provide full specs at this time. We are currently evaluating the development of tools to enable more capabilities for our publishing manufacturers.
Q: Will AQ become web-based and be able to be used in a browser window?
A: Moving forward, new products and solutions will be web-based solutions. The core AQ application will become web-based in the future and we and will provide more information as it becomes available.
Q: Does your system have the ability to integrate with Salesforce? We started a custom system to do updates that uses Salesforce as the change/update platform.
A: Currently, we do not have a Salesforce integration. However, in 2020 we are heavily investing in API development to better support these types of systems and applications used by our customers.
Q: Is there a way to program different pricing structures into AQ? For example, we have certain customers within buying groups that get a different pricing structure than a standard customer.
A: AQ publishes LIST prices only and your customers enter their discounts (received by you) on their end. You can give each one of your customers a different discount percentage to enter, which the system will apply to all the prices published for that specific customer.
If you want to be able to setup different NET prices for a group of customers, you can always provide them with deviated prices that they can download directly to their systems. Please note, you will be responsible for updating those deviated prices, when applicable. This link (https://support.aqnet.com/hc/en-us/articles/203399477-Multiple-Item-Deviated-Pricing) shows in detail how this function works.
Please reach out to content@aqnet.com with additional questions.
