Excel-lent Choice

The folks at Stupid Prices have found that there’s nothing dumb about selling quality, name-brand goods at steep discounts.

Although the chain of 19 discount stores in California and Washington lacks the sophisticated systems employed by larger retail companies, it still must manage an inventory that can add as many as 50,000 items a day. The company accomplishes this, as well as constant pricing updates, using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and an online collaboration service.

Online collaboration isn’t a new concept; millions of consumers collaborate online through blogs and the like. And large online operators like Amazon rely on purchaser reviews (another form of collaboration) to help build loyalty and sell products.

Now online collaboration is an emerging option for managing inventory at small businesses running on Microsoft Office products. It’s a trend made possible by the falling costs of communications and relational database technologies. And it means that companies like Stupid Prices can now search, locate and price inventory with the speed and efficiency of larger companies, ensuring pricing uniformity across the entire chain.

“We’re just a glorified ‘mom and pop’,” says Brian Anderson, partner in charge of logistics for the brand’s California stores. In fact, the company doesn’t even support a centralized POS system. “This is the next best thing,” he says.

Lacking an online POS system, store personnel had to convey information about inventory and pricing changes by telephone or the faxing of Excel spreadsheets. It’s a process that had become cumbersome and prone to errors, especially since prices on some big-ticket items (like TVs) change almost daily.

Stupid Prices wasn’t alone. “There are plenty of companies where most day-to-day communications with suppliers and stores is still done using Excel spreadsheets,” says George Langan, CEO of eXpresso, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of gateway services that extend the functionality of Excel spreadsheets, supporting real-time sharing and collaboration. With eXpresso, Anderson and his colleagues can make changes to inventory and pricing and see changes made by others accessing the same file via the web. The cost: less than $100 per user annually.

“We take [a user’s] Excel spreadsheet to our servers and store it in a relational database,” Langan says. “The beauty of it all is that we keep very detailed records of every change that’s made.”

eXpresso leverages the flexibility of a web 2.0 environment with the power of Oracle database technology to support collaboration within and between companies. All that’s required is a web browser and an Excel license. “Our service lets companies treat Excel spreadsheets as enterprise assets rather than hidden, closeted repositories of critical business data,” Langan says.

eXpresso does not compete with Microsoft Excel, Langan says. “We’re just adding functionality.” It can be likened to online collaboration tools like Google Docs, except those products typically rely on non-Microsoft applications that are more or less compatible with Excel, he says. eXpresso essentially uses a stripped down version of Office as its underlying software.

In addition to being an online tool, eXpresso supports offline work with a special plug-in: Spreadsheets opened offline are only available to other users once they have been uploaded and saved online. “It saves us a lot of time, and it brings consistency to pricing and other changes,” Anderson says. Store personnel not only have a better handle on what’s available at their locations, but they can also check availability at other stores and ensure pricing consistency across the chain.

Stupid Prices operates 9,000- to 20,000-sq.-ft. locations in California and its home state of Washington, selling name-brand merchandise at steep discounts. Its moniker grew from the reactions of early customers to the store’s bargains: The company is so confident that it has the lowest prices that it offers a 120 percent refund should a customer find the exact product at a lower price within 30 days at another bricks-and-mortar retailer. (Reaction in some communities, however, has prompted the company to name all new stores Smart Buys at Stupid Prices, with retrofits to existing stores to follow.)

Price tag includes tax
In the stores, shoppers will spot a hodgepodge of bargains, from canned foods to high-end appliances. And to keep things simple, the price on each item includes all taxes.

The chain’s buyers pick through merchandise that’s being offloaded by wholesale clubs and retailing giants, resulting in an average of 50,000 new items arriving at its warehouse every day. Although it can’t name sources, the company says it does business with more than 400 name-brand vendors. Merchandise includes clearance items, discontinued products, overstocks, customer returns, closeouts and factory overruns.

eXpresso makes use of a concept known as “cloud computing” that effectively delivers industrial-strength computing power over the Internet in support of workaday tasks like inventory management and risk analysis.

eXpresso adds a level of Excel functionality that Microsoft seems to have ignored, Langan says, and it provides a detailed audit trail down to the document cell level.

For now, eXpresso works only with Internet Explorer, although Langan expects versions running over other web browsers to be available soon. Services similar to eXpresso that support additional Microsoft Office applications, including Word and PowerPoint, are in development, he says.