Employee or In-House Store Option

General ShopSite user discussion

Employee or In-House Store Option

Postby Swine » Thu Oct 08, 2020 11:44 am

Maybe this is a pipe dream but I'm going to throw it out there.

Wondering if there is any way to create a mirror or shadow version of a shopsite store that would be available to our employees only so they could use it to take orders over the phone.

I know they could simply create a sale with the customer's credit card over the phone, but we would need a few overrides. We print a magazine, and get a lot of orders for our products via the US Mail. So we need to include shipping amounts in the ads for those products. BUT, they are only estimates. If someone orders the same product (s) on our website, the shipping is nearly always different. So, it would be great if we had a version of the store where we could manually put in a shipping amount to charge for a customer on the phone. We can't just add that as an option to the regular store or all of our web orders would be making up their own shipping amounts.

Does this make sense? Maybe there's an option I'm missing?
Eric
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Re: Employee or In-House Store Option

Postby loren_d_c » Thu Oct 08, 2020 1:51 pm

There isn't really a 'phone order' specific interface, but a couple of things you could do is make duplicates of all your products (I would suggest a slightly different name/sku to make them recognizable as such) and mark them as 'No Shipping Charges' products, then make a variable-priced product called 'Shipping' (or make it Vriable Name, too, so you could enter whatever shipping name you wanted) to add shipping to the orders. You could list these products only on a password-protected page(s), or not even on your website at all, maybe you could just put the links to them on an internal wiki if you have something like that or in a PDF file only distributed internally (not sure if you can have a form for the variable price/name product in a PDF, though). You could even have just one variable name/sku/price product to use for ALL of your products and have your order takers just type in the name, SKU, and price for each product being ordered, but that has the potential to introduce more mistakes and confusion in your order process if they put something in wrong.

If you do lots of phone orders and are placing them via ShopSite, I would also suggest checking the 'Remove Shopper Cookie' option in Commerce > Order System > Thank You so the Checkout screen won't automatically be populated with the address info of the last shopper they took an order for, which could get annoying.

-Loren
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Re: Employee or In-House Store Option

Postby Swine » Fri Oct 09, 2020 9:19 am

Thanks for the response!

I'm disappointed there isn't a simpler solution. Duplicating and changing SKUs will change our accounting system monitoring of sales and inventory. Could still work, but would definitely impact how everything else works down the line.

Will give it some thought. Thanks again.

-Eric
Eric
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Posts: 143
Joined: Tue Apr 03, 2007 8:36 am


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