Can customer check order status?

[jxm28788]

I have seen a few websites out there that allow the customer, when logged in, to view their order history and also the status of any current orders (eg. pending, packed, dispatched etc).

Is there any way of doing this in Actinic -

1) out of the box?
2) with some not too drastic scripting?
3) with a 3rd party add-on?

If not available, would this be a useful feature for anyone else? Worth adding to the wish list for v8...? :D

[I-CC]

I think that the ability to have live order status would require a Db online within the hosting server, which as Actinic does not use a Db, well not online, then out of the box is not possible I am afraid, but sure some enterprising developer might have already or could develop it, but it would need to be tied into the Actinic accounts side of life to work would have thought...

[Mike Hughes]

There is somebody offering a service that can do this kind of thing for a monthly fee, but you could script it yourself. Here's how I'd do it (I'm biased towards excel because I'm hopeless with Access):

1. Use excel to get the status of orders from the catalog database.
2. Save the data into a CSV file, ftp to server, import using phpadmin.
3. Get customer to enter required info into a form. use PHP to validate customer and present the relevant order status.

Mike

Maybe I should develop a 'canned' solution to do this. Or should I leave this to Jan ?

[Jan]

You can buy an off the shelf addon to do this (not from me sadly ;-) ) - several of my customers use it and have said that it is good. More details here :

http://www.codepath.co.uk/web_ordertracking.htm

Many thanks,

[jxm28788]

aaiiieee!!! not at those prices! :eek:

I'd pay a one off fee to buy something similar, but ongoing fees? forget it!

[Jan]

I didn't think that £9 - £29 per month was that expensive - I didn't realise that there was a £99 setup fee as well though. It might be worth calling the company and offering to pay them a reaonable amount of money for a full license rather than a monthly one. At a guess I would say that the monthly payment option is there to make the software more affordable for people in the short term.

Regards,

[Mike Hughes]

They've done it that way because their solution is both PC and server based.

i.e. you run the report on your Pc and then upload the database to their server where customers can check the status.

I guess they do it that way to avoid problems with customer servers having the wrong capability/configuration.

Maybe I should write it anyway. It's not that difficult really (though making it a real product is always a lot of work).

Mike

[jxm28788]

how much do you think you'd charge for it...? :)

[Jan]

:-) Much to hard for me to do because it is server based rather than PC based.

Cheers,

[Mike Hughes]

how much do you think you'd charge for it...?

That would depend.

If it's just simple, say a rolling 30 day status on all orders, then I'd probably sell licences for something like £30/$50.

If you wanted a full status on previous orders, including items purchased in the past then it would have to be more like £60/$100.

What do you think? Would I get any takers?

Mike

[jxm28788]

I would take the simple option, but it would need to be as maintenance free as possible - I don't have time to be messing around entering information for every order (only messages where the order is delayed or cancelled or whatever)

It could strip out the info for order received (with date/time etc), and when it was invoiced from actinic. When it was dispatched could, I guess, be linked to the existence of an 'order dispatched' e-mail (those of us that use auto-mole would have the 'shipped' tag set automatically as soon as it was processed). NOt sure how you'd do 'packed and ready for dispatch' though. A function that would allow *me* to check the status of all orders would be useful if that could be done at the same time, as I'm bound to forget to send a few 'order dispatched' e-mails.

Actually, it would be good if I could stop sending the dispatched e-mails altogether and just let the customer chase their order through this function. So maybe I could 'dispatch' orders manually via this tool, by selecting multiple orders and clicking a dispatch button to update the status...?

This is my 'just crawled out of bed' ramblings, maybe I'll come back when I've woken up - Anyone else have any ideas?

[Jan]

If those prices are one off fees I think that you would get lots of takers. Online order tracking is something that I get asked for all of the time.

With the full order status option you need to keep privacy issues in mind because you would probably be contravening some law or other if you put peoples order details online in a form that it not properly encrypted.

Even at those prices you will get people that want to steal your work so you should also put some sort of licensing and tracking in place.

Regards.

[Mike Hughes]

The more I think about it the more the simple option looks like the best way to go. It has fewer privacy implications and makes the server database much smaller. It's also the one I'd want to use on my site.

In terms of licensing, I am talking about a one off fee (upgrades would be chargeable, probably at 50% of the full cost).

If anyone has any particular needs from this kind of script then do post them here. I am now looking at the feasibility of this.

Mike

[Paragon]

We would be interested in such a tracking feature for 2-3 of our Actinic based retail sites. For us too it would also need to be as maintenance free as possible.
But a facility for the customer to enter their order number and see a status message would be great, if we could add a custom message/status that would be even better. It would also need to have an e-mail button so they could contact us in the event of further query (automatically adding the order number to the e-mail subject)

[rmladden]

There is somebody offering a service that can do this kind of thing for a monthly fee, but you could script it yourself. Here's how I'd do it (I'm biased towards excel because I'm hopeless with Access):

1. Use excel to get the status of orders from the catalog database.
2. Save the data into a CSV file, ftp to server, import using phpadmin.
3. Get customer to enter required info into a form. use PHP to validate customer and present the relevant order status.

Mike

This is how I do it, except I wrote a Perl script instead of PHP. I preprocess the CSV file on my PC using Perl, then I FTP upload the data into a flat file on the server, and another Perl script searches it by customer telephone number (customers always seem to lose the order number, even if if they had the e-mail). No database, not elegant, but it does the job.

[Mike Hughes]

I'm starting to lean towards a using a text file myself as the amount of data will be limited and it stops people having to worry about MySQL. I'm thinking of doing some sort of simple encryption to stop people viewing the whole file.

Mike

[rmladden]

I placed the file in a directory that has the permissions set so it is not viewable from the web, but the Perl script can still access it.

[Mike Hughes]

I guess that makes sense. At least we know all actinic users have a working cgi-bin.

Mike

[jxm28788]

But a facility for the customer to enter their order number and see a status message would be great, if we could add a custom message/status that would be even better. It would also need to have an e-mail button so they could contact us in the event of further query (automatically adding the order number to the e-mail subject)I have several shipping options (courier, 1st class, 3-4 parcel) and which one the customer gets depends on which one they chose, but also they may get upgraded depending on the weight (if they chose 3-4 day, but it was light it would go first class mail, if it was heavy they'd get upgraded to courier). Therefore, I would need some way of not only saying 'order shipped' but choosing from a menu - 'order shipped by next day courier', 'order shipped by 1st class post' etc.

So I would see it working that I could select a bunch of orders and set them to 'next day', select another bunch and set them to '1st class' and then maybe select the odd one or two for a 'custom' message.

Not sure of the best way for them to select their order - they don't always fill in the telephone or may forget which number they used (mobile/home/work/fake), and they sometimes spell their e-mail incorrectly so won't always get the confirmation with the order number...

[rmladden]

My preprocessing script merges in some shipping information. Then I upload the file. It's all very custom.

I require the telephone number on orders. They can try all their numbers. If they can't manage that, they don't deserve to know about their order. :rolleyes:

[jxm28788]

That would depend.

If it's just simple, say a rolling 30 day status on all orders, then I'd probably sell licences for something like £30/$50.

If you wanted a full status on previous orders, including items purchased in the past then it would have to be more like £60/$100.

What do you think? Would I get any takers?

Mike
So did anything ever come of this? We're a couple of years, and 2 versions further on and the 'order history' feature is still a) not available, and b) in big demand....

[Mike Hughes]

I haven't done anything on this. Too many other things to do.

Mike