Market Xpert Help Library 


Help Topics:

Essendant Market Xpert YouTube Video Series

Video 3: Bid Wizard – Introduction

  • An introduction to Bid Wizard, the powerful data processing component of Market Xpert.
  • Watch the video

Outline

Ø  Bid Wizard is a powerful tool for organizing and responding to bid requests, and it can do much more

Ø  Access to Bid Wizard is controlled by your account administrator and may not be available to all logins

Ø  When you login to your Market Xpert account for the first time, Bid Wizard will be empty and contain no bids

·         A "Bid" is a list of items that you need to perform an action on

§  These actions include:

§  Converting supplier item numbers into your item numbers, as in Staples numbers to Essendant numbers

§  Price a list of items you received in an Excel file for a customer

§  Pricing an entire wholesaler catalog or matrix for a customer

§  Pricing printed copies of customer invoices

§  Even creating a contract for your back-end computer system

·         There are several preferences the system administrator can set for Bid Wizard

§  Login to your Market Xpert account and click the Preferences button on the toolbar

§  Click the Site Options

§  Click EX - Bid Wizard

§  You can turn on and off access to Bid Wizard, this is usually done at the individual user level

§  Factoring chain prices in Excel outputs should be Yes, this adds a separate column in your Excel file converting the chain price to your wholesalers unit of measure

§  You can set the default output format. Excel output formats are discussed in Bid Wizard – Export functions

§  When Include Chain Flags is set to Yes, Like, Factored, On Sale, Out flags are added to your Excel outputs

§  When Include Chain Manufacturer Info is Yes, the chain manufacturer name and number is added to your Excel outputs

§  Setting the Use Excel 2010 Output Format allows for more than 64,000 rows in Excel outputs. You will need Excel 2010 or later to use files in this format

§  Use FTP for files requires support assistance. Please contact support if you want to use this function

Ø  Before you create a bid, you need to decide where you are going to get the items from

·         You can import an Excel file containing the items you want to work with. See Bid Wizard – Excel File Preparation and Bid Wizard – Importing Excel Files

·         You can use the wholesaler data contained in Market Xpert as your items to work with. See Bid Wizard – Exporting Wholesaler Data

·         Market Xpert contains all the public Essendant price and matrix plans, and several special lists of items that you can work with in Bid Wizard

·         You can use printed copies of invoices in the Favorites list function of Bid Wizard. See Bid Wizard – Creating Favorites Lists

Ø  Once you have created your list of items, you can then perform additional actions

·         You can precisely control how your Bid items are matched to our database. See Bid Wizard – Advanced Matching

·         You can add, change or delete items in your Bid and add sample usage. See Bid Wizard – Edit Functions

·         You can export your Bid to Excel and include additional information. See Bid Wizard – Export Functions

·         You can schedule your Bid to run automatically and send an email with updated data. See Bid Wizard – Schedule Functions

·         You can create Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF presentations for your customer. See Bid Wizard – My Presentations

Ø  When you add Price Strategies to Bid Wizard, you can create powerful, custom, matrix pricing programs based on market data

Ø  Bid Wizard is the center piece of a powerful pricing data delivery system that when fully utilized can:

Ø  Price the entire Essendant item list to your custom specifications

Ø  Deliver the data to you automatically and on your schedule

Ø  Provide the data in a format compatible with all popular back-end computer systems in the OP industry