Is there a single form or location for entering large orders of vex parts?
Navigating from page to page gets rather tedious for many item orders. I would like to fill a whole order sheet at once.
Also, is there an official parts list/sheet/database dump that we can use to enhance our club ordering process? Data quality from hand entered spreadsheets is pretty good but not 100%. Having an allowed value pick list would be wonderful.
Basically our teams fill out a spreadsheet and email them by ordering time, I concatenate into one sheet manually, and pivot to make an order part number by part number. The I go item by item in vex’s site to add items and wait for acceptance part by part. It takes a while for large orders.
I know, Google forms, fancy form fillers, validation scripts, and the like can all be done. But most of those start with a consistent source data set. Also you then have to set up an authentication mechanism to stop spam. Our email lists do that nicely right now.
One shortcut I can use is just to go by the part number in the URL. Get fancy with Excel it gets you somewhat there, but you are still ordering part by part…
Basically our teams fill out a spreadsheet and email them by ordering time, I concatenate into one sheet manually, and pivot to make an order part number by part number. The I go item by item in vex’s site to add items and wait for acceptance part by part. It takes a while for large orders.
I know, Google forms, fancy form fillers, validation scripts, and the like can all be done. But most of those start with a consistent source data set. Also you then have to set up an authentication mechanism to stop spam. Our email lists do that nicely right now.
One shortcut I can use is just to go by the part number in the URL. Get fancy with Excel it gets you somewhat there, but you are still ordering part by part…
There is no mass order form on the VEX site, unless it is very well hidden. Perhaps some of the resellers would have such an option. VEX also takes Purchase Orders for orders over $250. If you ask nicely, they might also process simple excel sheets. However, it might take longer as they need to enter it, invoice you and once paid it’ll ship.](http://content.vexrobotics.com/catalog/VEX_Catalog_2012_US_LoRes_Single.pdf)