Order Fulfilment Software

How do you keep track of your orders.

[derekwong28]

Shopping cart programs allow you to take orders via the Internet, but how do you fulfill these orders? Many carts aren't any help at all! Order fulfillment is messy. ou need a program that will help you keep track of items shipped, split orders, back orders, returned orders, drop-shipped orders, customer phone calls, sales tax, shipping labels, etc.

When we used Mal's, using its custom orders manager i.e. mOrders was easy. Now we are using lite version of x-cart, it has become very messy for us. We get around 20 orders a day and is becoming a real hassle. The cart will export to excel file format but we are finding that using excel was no where near as easy as using mOrders.

I wonder whether there are any other options? I understand that StoneEdge and Dynacomp order manager are best available at the moment, but our cart cannot export to these formats

I wonder whether quickbooks can be used for order fulfilment?

[andy_boyd]

There's an order manager built in to Interchange I believe, looks quite good too.

[jsinger]

We are overwhelmed too. Thinking of changing our whole site to Shopsite Cart mainly because it works with StoneEdge.

Anyone else have ideas for after-the-order software.

[balinor]

I've been using Litecommerce as well, and I'm guessing that exporting to Quickbooks might be a good option as well. Haven't tried it yet, but as soon as our orders get to overwhelming in Litecommerce, I may make the jump.

[TallTroll]

>> I wonder whether quickbooks can be used for order fulfilment?

Maybe. What you need is a competent accounting / stock control package, preferably with order import facilities. Ideally, you want a package that will handle XML imports, and get your online orders database to generate an XML stream of the validated orders. Even in the absence of XML capabilities, a good integration house should be able to write a middleware application that detects new orders, translates them into the format required by the backend software, and sends the validated orders back, and drops them into the SOP batch

[gussie]

derekwong:

May I ask why you stopped using Mal's? I'm new to this and I'm considering using Mal's and its mOrders order tracker. I'm just curious as to why you switched.

Thanks
Gussie

[your_store]

I'm currently trying to get Mail Order Manager up and running. MOM looks like it is going to be able to handle about everything we're going to need on the inventory / order management side. Might be worth at least checking out.

[derekwong28]

Hi Gussie

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Mal's. mOrders is truely a brilliant piece of software. I have seen known Mal's servers to go down.

The problem is that Mal's, or for that matter any third party hosted cart such as 1shoppingcart, americart etc. is that they are OK if you intend to sell a small no, of products only.

In our case, we sell a large number of electronic products whose price and specifications change very often and it gets very tedious when you want to update your site. It would be extremely easy to make mistakes in such a situation. A dyanimically generated catalog is the best option rather than plain html pages which plugs into a third party hosted cart.

Of course, you have to balance this with the fact that static html pages are much more easy to optimize and thus rank highly in search engines. What we have done is to retain our old highly-ranked pages and plug them into our new shopping cart.

Derek

[gussie]

Thank you Derek, that was a very informative reply. It is that sort of information that makes this site so useful.

Gussie

[sun818]

derek, you can use a dynamic script and still use Mal's Cart if you want. You would need to modify the dynamic code so the links point to the Mal's Cart. All my content is static but it is published from a database.

mOrders 1.xx has a DOS command line tool (tdbdatax from TurboDB web site) that lets you export the data to CSV. Once I export the mOrders files, I import into an Access database. There I can use the GUI front end to keep track of orders, send e-mails, etc. The mOrders database format changed with version 2.xx so this tool will only work with mOrders 1.xx:

tdbdatax ITEMS.DAT MalsItems.csv -fsdf -s"¦"
tdbdatax ORDERS.DAT MalsOrders.csv -fsdf -s"¦"

1) tdbdatax is the command line tool
2) the pipe character is the delimiter for both CSV files.

As a side note, I believe AmeriCart shopping cart is compatible with the StoneEdge Order Manager. Other order management software with Windows desktop front end are Actinic and Sales Channel Manager by Saboti.

[M2D_Media]

Maybe Maximizer would work?

[edited by: TallTroll at 3:56 pm (utc) on Feb. 18, 2004]
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