I would like to enter orders that I get from sources other than my store (telephone, auctions, etc) but it is not obvious to me how to do it. Searching the documentation doesn't seem to help.

Thanks in advance
Glen

Glen,

At this point, we actually place the order as if we were the customer on the site, going through all the site steps to create cart and checkout.

I read somewhere in the forum that is working on the ability to add orders directly in admin panel...not sure how they would set it up, but it would be very useful and much faster. We get a lot of phone and fax orders and manually enter them through the cart...very time consuming.

We are also very much looking forward to seeing this new feature added.

Me too! I have a lot of repeat customers who like to phone their orders in. I'd love an easy way to pull up the customers record and enter the order so they don't have to repeat themselves or wait while I look up an old order.

Been asking for this for two years. One of the reasons we went with Ordermotion. If this is implemented manual orders should be able to be placed without an email address since many phone customers don't have an email address or just don't want to give them. We should also be able to classify an order as mail order or phone order.

Sewin - an easy way to get a reorder done quickly is to log in as if you are the customer and there is a reorder option ... somewhat difficult to locate but it does save some steps in the end.

The best would be to have a quick order entry through the admin panel.

An update from on this would be appreciated.

YES YES YES YES - oh, did I say YES! what about a walk in customer or a Money order customer? Paypal customers on our site go to a page and fill out a form and submit that and then also send paypal to a certain address because we were losing business due to the MC paypal option. Please let us enter orders manually! Also - .... it would allow your sales to date to be a more accurate with less work-

Please MR. ..... can we enter some orders in manuall?

Any updates on when manual order entry in admin panel will be available?

Thanks,

Ya anyone from development have any info on this great/necessary addition?

We looked into ordermotion but transaction-based pricing wasn't up our alley. We want to keep all customer, product, and transaction data on MC... we just need a nice form page to interact with that data. I've seen many merchants ask for this, like adding phone orders, changing order details (shipping method, etc.).
Otherwise we are forced to use a mish mosh of procedures when a simpler one is so close...
-crossing my fingers-

I hope I don't offend anyone out there. I am just confused as to how much you are expecting and relying on your web hosts shopping cart software.

I think it is very risky to rely so heavily on technology that is not even loaded into your own computer. Correct me if I am missing the whole point to this. I use as a shopping cart only. I do not use the inventory function, because there are other ways we sell products, not just MOTO. We use an older version of Quickbooks and does not integrate with it. Quickbooks is where our customer database is, not on s server. We do not have access to the files in the file manager to be able to access and download our customer database.

I see requests for things that seem off the wall to me. It goes well beyond the scope of what the shopping cart software was intended to do. I think needs to seperate all these differents types of services and have a core shopping cart with all the bells and whistles of online retailing. All extra stuff, like inventory tracking, drop-shipping, printing invoices and packing slips, being able to manually enter orders, etc. should be plug-ins. These are things that help us, the merchant. They are not things that help us to sell or help our customers to buy easier.

Tigger,
Of course all businesses are different. We are MOTO and online, but we plan on expanding to brick and mortar down the line. The idea here is that shoppers choose to shop online and by phone. Be it to change an existing order, it's details, or create an entire new order, these are all functions that exist in one form or another on MC. The item missing, iamb, is more functionality in order entry/management. If you have a different process then us, or don't have a need for this functionality, then don't use it.
It just seems that all the information is there already and it makes sense to house all channels of customer transactional data in one place.
We are choosing and trusting MC for our online business so we are equally comfortable with putting everything in one spot. They have redundancies and I'm sure there's a way to get the raw data (over the phone perhaps).
Does that make more sense?
I'm staring at the bay on vacation so I might be a little off

Well, 4 years ago we started going to the NJ shore for 2 weeks. Which then turned into three. Now it's at 5 weeks. So, I got cable internet on the porch so I can keep working on our damned website. But it's cool, I work for 1-2 hours and then get sunburned some more . And I'm soo anxious to get our site online. The word is out to our friends and their haggling us to get our store open.

Also, I think this other post is pretty much requesting the same things:
The Other Post

Hey guys -

You're right in that we are going to have a back end order processing engine built into the cart.

When?... well, it's still a little ways out for sure. Currently the majority of our development time is being geared towards improving cart performance in preparation for the holiday season.

This is going to take a few months. However, upon completion, we'll be back on track for new features. In particular, we are going to have a whole "new and improved" order management system where you can place orders in the back end, update already placed orders with real time shipping rates, refund credit cards from your admin panel, and more.

All good stuff. It's going to take some time, though.

I would LOVE an ETA. The phone orders is the biggest catch for us. I can deal with eveything else for a while.
Thanks for the reply, Sabres

Sorry John, no ETA right now. Not until 2005 most likely due to the overall scope of the project. But this is something that's a high priority that we'll be moving on as fast as we can once our code performance updates are complete.

So Yahoo stores have all that?

We are a real bricks-and-mortar store, so we don't rely on our website for anything other than receiving online orders.

We actually have two separate programs in house for all that. One is for inventory and sales, the other is for bookkeeping and accounting. They can't interface, but we have it set up so they don't really need to. Very little information needs to be entered twice. Of course, all of our online orders do need to be manually entered in our database.

For us, this is the easiest route as online sales are just part of our business. It would actually take us longer to enter walk-in and phone sales on MC than the other way around. Also, our inventory program is specific to our needs and could never offer the types of reports we get from it.

It's amazing the different needs we all have. I think really does a great job of integrating so many features to help so many different types of online businesses.

Patti

With Linkpoint it's quick to enter Point of Sale transactions whether phone, mail, or in person. Do the other merchant accounts not offer this?
Jean

We also use entirely for all order processing, Phone, Fax and Amazon (we are also an amazon seller). THis helps us keep all the information in one place and it is easier to create reports. We do not have a brick and mortor business. We also tried the Quickbooks approach and found that daunting to say the least. We spent about a month trying to integrate it using books and got no where.

We enter the order ourselves just as a customer would. It is not a real big deal. Regardless of what system you use you will have to enter the customers information.

My biggest headache is that often we are adjusting the price with manually entered order. We may have given a proce break for some reason, so you can't enter a legit email address or the customer gets an email with the wrong price. So we enter a bogus email address and then adjust the price. At this point though there is no way to resend the order information to the customer with all the correct information. This would be a nice feature, to resend the order confirmation email

Yes, yes, yes!

The ability to re-send order confirmation emails is a must.

So many customers change their orders, change their shipping methods, or just plain enter their email address wrong.

If it's an incorrect email address, I just forward the email confirmation we receive, but with a changed order, they always want another confirmation.

Please consider making this feature available.

Patti