Best Practices – CommerceHub Support

This article contains tips and tricks to help you and your trading partners use CommerceHub's Dsco platform.

Account

Time Zones: The default time zone in the portal is UTC. You can change the time zone on the General Settings page (Settings > General Settings).
Passwords: If you ever forget your password and need to reset it:
1. Go to the Login page.
2. Enter your email address and click Continue.
3. Click Forgot password? below the Password field.
4. Enter your email address and click Continue. You will receive an email with instructions to reset your password.
Email addresses: Email addresses are case-sensitive. If your login attempt fails, double check the case of your email address.
Subscription Types: There are two different types of subscriptions:
- Users: These are paying customers who connect with more than one trading partner through the Dsco platform.
- Invited Users: These are users who have been invited to connect with a Dsco platform user. These types of users only have one connection through the Dsco platform.

Import Failures: If you know that a specific ASN, invoice, or cancellation failed to import into Dsco and you would like to find out why, be sure to search for the PO number in Orders > All Orders. The PO details page shows all error messages related to that specific PO.
Failure Notifications: When creating an automated job, be sure to include at least one email address in the Failure Notifications field. That way, we can email you a link to the logs for any process that experienced a failure of some kind.

EDI: If using EDI, remember that every file being received by Dsco can be imported by a single import job that uses the EDI - Import process. There is no need to create a job for each EDI transaction type.
Job Scheduling: If you would like a certain job to run once per day, it is best practice to create a single job that runs daily instead of creating seven jobs that run on different days of the week.
Custom Maps: The Dsco platform can map to your specific inventory, shipment, and invoice file templates. You can create a Custom Map that matches your files’ own headers so Dsco can import and export the data in the format you want.
Automated Job Names: Be sure to give your Automated Jobs unique names so that you can filter by Job Name effectively. Even inactive jobs or deleted jobs will still be searchable in the history, so use new names for new jobs.

Test POs: Gandalf will generate test POs for you. But before he can do so, at least two items need to be loaded into the Dsco account for the test POs to be created against.
Completing Onboarding: When you reach the final step of Gandalf, clicking the button to finalize your connection will not cause your account to go live immediately. Instead, clicking that button simply means that you have completed onboarding, and it triggers Dsco to notify your trading partner of this (additionally, Gandalf will be removed from the account and all test PO data will be deleted).
Use Your Preferred Integration Method: Gandalf wants you to test via your preferred integration method. He will ask you to do a few manual checks in your browser, but anytime he asks you to send an “update” or a “file,” he wants you to do that per your normal process for sending data.

File Upload Results: After uploading a flat-file, you can check Automation > History to see the result of the upload. The results don’t update in real time, so be sure to refresh the page frequently.
Status Column: The text “Finished” or “Failed” showing in the "Status" column is a link. Click to see detailed logs. We dump our log data about six weeks after a log is generated. If the text under “Status” is not a link, the logs no longer exist.
Order Lifecycles: You can see the entire lifecycle of an order, including details about any process that caused any type of update for an order. Navigate to Orders > All Orders, search for and then select the PO you want to view, then scroll to the bottom of the screen to view its “History”.
Job Names That Start with “Dsco”: When viewing Automation History, a job name that begins with Dsco, such as “Dsco Inventory Download”, denotes a file download/upload that was initiated manually via the portal.
Useful Filter: You can select the “Did Work” filter as a quick way to filter out all instances where a job runs and does nothing (usually because no file was found to process).

Item Creation: Once you create an item and at least one order is received against that item, it can never be deleted from your Dsco portal. This is to preserve history and data integrity.
Manual and Automated Processes: Even if you normally use automated processes to pass data to your retailer, such as EDI or API, you can still use the portal to make simple updates when desired, such as changing an item’s quantity, canceling an order or a line item, and/or adding a tracking number to an order. Taking manual actions in the portal does not interfere with any automated processes.