Group items to send to multiple delivery addresses

[shelleyh]

It would be great if customers could choose to group different items from their shopping carts to deliver to different delivery addresses.

If Actinic already allows this in some way, please let me know!

[Mike Hughes]

I don't know any ecommerce system that does this. Normally customers would place a separate order for each delivery address.

Is there someting in particular you want to use this for?

Mike

[jont]

I think that would open up a whole new level of scam for the guys in Lagos.

If you are wanting a customer to have multiple orders and delivery destinations it is usually easier to get them to email a spreadsheet with the details and process the order offline.

We do this at Christmas as send out gifts to 100's of staff / customers would take a week going through the website for each one. As it is most companies have the info already in Excel with the address details and far quicker for them to offload to me and we sort it for them - they are very appreciative of this "fire and forget" service.

[shelleyh]

Thanks for your replies. Yes, I would want to use it as our site deals primarily with gifts, so people are buying items as gifts for other people. Our cart allows people to add as many hampers as they want, and then hits them with the 'surprise' that they can only have them delivered to one address. This means that - if this hasn't put them off - they have to go back and remove items from their cart and go through the whole process of finding the item, adding it, and purchasing it over and over again. Of course, they could call us or email us, but what percentage would? Especially since many of our orders come from abroad, out of hours. The internet is about immediacy, and I think we are leaving a lot of money on the table here as a result.

Especially when it comes to Christmas, I wonder about how many abandoned carts are due to this problem (does anyone have any tips for how i can see how many abandoned carts have more than one item in them and at what point they were abandoned, so I can find out for sure?).

If you look at online merchants like Harvey Nichols and Godiva, they deal with this scenario very well. I love the Harvey Nichols process - it's very smooth.

I think this would really make the Actinic offering far better suited to gift-based businesses.

Thanks.

[JGLIGHTING]

One way might be to use the "other info question". Saying please enter delivery address if different from card holder address.

[shelleyh]

Thanks, JG. We do currently use this option to allow users to put in one delivery address (for us 90% of orders go to a different address from the billing address, so this is a must).

The issue for us is that our users may want to send a number of gifts to different people, especially at Christmas. They go through our site and add the gifts to their basket, get to checkout, and find that they can only send the items to a single delivery address. They cannot choose to send gift 1 to address 1, gift 2 to address 2, etc. At this point they can choose to remove all but one item from the cart and send that to one address and go back over and again to search for an item, add to the cart and go through the order process again, call or email us for help, or simply abandon their cart and go somewhere else.

It's option 3 that I am concerned makes up a good percentage of our abandoned carts. Given that these would have contained multiple items, I think that could make up a lot of lost revenue.

#1 item on my wishlist. Anyone from dev know whether it's ever been considered or is on the product roadmap somewhere?

[Rich Brady]

Shelley,

I don't think there will be enough Actinic customers wanting this, so the likelyhood is that it won't make it into a release anytime soon.

You may need to see if someone could do some bespoke work for you?