Order management & fulfillment solutions

[kjs50]

Hello,

I'm looking to see how others manage their etail order fulfillment.

I currently am taking more and more web orders, and the order manager software is something that was intended to manage my ebay orders. So I have to manually copy and paste any weborders into the auction software (no importing possible). I then paste the information into Endicia (for USPS) and FedEx website for Ground orders. It's quite a hassle now that I'm doing about 30 orders a day.

I'm looking for a better solution to import my orders from the website into a order manager software. Ideally, the software could integrate into a shipping solution as well, but preventing the reentering of orders if firstmost.

I've heard of Dydacomp Order Manager but have heard some bad things about support and cost. Are there any other solutions out there that people are using?

I was looking for some MS Access applications as well, but no luck on that either. I don't want to write a custom Access application yet, but might have to.

I saw a software called StoneEdge as well, but only integrates with UPS. I ship mostly with FedEx Ground and USPS Priority Mail.

So how are people managing their software operations?

Thanks!

[jsinger]

We are in the same boat. Our e-commerce product sales are double the level of last year. We have one person do almost all aspects of product fulfillment. She's very good at filling orders and doing the shipping (mostly UPS). But we need to break up the tasks among several people.

She prints out orders and files them manually. When an order is shipped it is moved into a "completed" file folder. The addressed is typed into the UPS computer where a label is printed for the package. Really primative.

[Brett_Tabke]

I take it you have been through the popular and approved ebay packages?

[kjs50]

Yes,

I've looked at all those. And actually, the ones made for eBay have quite different functionality than what I need for my web orders.

I use Sold by TimberCreek Software for my ebay sales, and it works beautifully for that. Downloads all the auction information and I can send great customized emails.

At first I was entering my web orders as new orders into Sold, but I had to copy and paste all the customer info and manually select the items they ordered. This has led to a few errors in shipping because now with about 10 eBay orders a day and 15-20 web orders, it takes a fair amount of time. Doesn't seem like a long time, but it is. The ebay orders are by far the easiest.

I've been taking a closer look at Stone Edge Order Manager. It doesn't integrate with the shopping cart that I use, but if I can convert my orders into the proper format, I can upload into it. And from there, I can print all the appropriate packing slips, send emails, and output a text file for importing into FedEx. Integrating into my USPS software (Endicia) will be a lot trickier since Endicia only allows XML imports for order imports.

If you guys are interested, I can put up more information, as I will probably purchase the software tomorrow. The Stone Edge guys are very responsive and helpful by the way.

I've looked all over the web, and really only found 3 possible solutions:

Stone Edge

Mail Order Manager (Saw various comments about poor customer service and make you buy many extra modules that I think should be a part of the base package)

eResponse (by Bonafide Software, also looks promising and the company was responsive to my questions)

Thanks.

[remoteoffice]

try Ystoretools.com
They have very reasonable Excel based software for orders.You can upload to shipping , to your bookeeping program, etc.

Beth

[edited by: engine at 4:52 pm (utc) on June 23, 2003]
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