Managing Your E-commerce Orders
Magento has concentrated quite hard on the order management side of ecommerce, basically handing over all features of managing your order books to the user. This post will basically be a run-down of the main features of the order management system and how you can use these to process orders that you receive over the phone or even in store.
The main features that we will cover in this section are:
- Handy FREE Extensions
- Processing an Order over the Phone
- Getting around PayPal Pro/Maestro problem
- Editing Prices on-the-fly
- Organization
The above should cover most of what clients will need to be able to manage themselves once a Magento site is signed off and passed across.
Handy FREE Extensions
A couple of features that Magento (as default) sadly lacks is the ability to export your order list as a .csv file. Something that it manages to do fine with products but has somehow been overlooked for order management.
With this handy free extension you can now get this functionality:
Also you may find this extension handy – it allows you to delete canceled orders – so they don’t remain on your order list.
Processing an Order over the Phone
What you will find when you have an ecommerce store is that when customers visit your site – a good number of them will want to process their order over the phone. This could be because either they a) Don’t trust online payments as far as they can virtually throw them, or b) prefer to know that there is a company at the other end of this pretty little window.
Either way you will get customers over the phone.
When using Magento you can easily log in to your back-end and process an order. All you need to do is take down the following information (this is assuming you are using PayPal pro or similar):
- Mr/Mrs, Name, Email, Address (first line, city, county, postcode, country), telephone.
- Product Name (or SKU), quantity and any other additional info such as billing address (if different) and company name etc.
- Credit Card information – Card Type, Long Card Number, Expiry Date, CSV Number (if applicable – start date, issue number)
When you have all this information you are ready to insert your order manually into mangeto.
Log in to your back-end. Navigate to sales>orders. Then click on Create New Order (top-right).
Here you will see a list of customers that have visited your site and placed orders – you can even reorder for one of these customers but for now we will click on “create new customer”. After clicking this you will be presented with a large blank form that you can fill in with the details you took over the phone.
- If you had clicked on an existing customer this information would be auto-filled.
After filling out that information you should click on the “add products” button at the top of the page. This will let you search for your product and add it to the order. There are a few details that can be edited here that I will cover later on but for now simply add the product and the quantity that you require onto the order.
After this you will see a payment section and a delivery section at the bottom of the page – simply fill out the payment using the details taken from the phone call (hsbc/paypal pro).
After entering all this information you can click “Create Order”. The order is then placed – and all emails are sent out as per usual – the order is also added to your order list.
Getting Around the PayPal Pro / Maestro Problem
All is good with the above section until you are faced with PayPal pro and are holding the details of a maestro card. The way to get around this is to enable your PayPal standard account (which will use the same log in as your PayPal pro account), you will then have to go through the checkout process of your site – entering the customers details as you go. When visiting the PayPal site to pay -choose the option on the left which states “pay with a card”.
Editing Prices on-the-fly
If you have agreed a special price over the phone as a gesture of goodwill or the like, you can edit the prices of the products that you place on the order as you order them – this will not affect the actual price of the item on the store.
A good example of the need for this was presented to me earlier today. Our client had told a customer over the phone that the price of 2x items at £19.99 included the delivery – however the magento store did not allow this. The delivery charge would have been applied at £5.50.
We got around this
by obviously taking the cost of the delivery off of the item using that “user custom price” tick box. £2.75 off of each item meant that delivery was now included. An additional note stating this change was made in the “comments” section of the order form. The order was then processed and the customer was happy.
Organization
In terms of organizing your orders there are several housekeeping things that you can do. With those extensions made above it’s easy to delete canceled orders (such as early development test orders) and also its easy to export your orders to .csv for printing or backing up or sending to colleagues.
Another good thing to practice in the back end is ensuring that you follow the main steps of completing an order, on the invoices page you can create memo’s and also let the customer know when an item has been shipped. There are simple buttons for these but keeping the customer informed on the movement of their purchased items does make them feel a lot better about purchasing from your site.
I hope these little tips have smoothed over some of those frown wrinkles caused by the back-end of magento. If nothing else, it has eaten up 5 minutes of your day reading it.
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