Actinic Link (Sage Line 50) How to communicate with buyers?

[alwest]

I am quite new to Actinic...so please be gentle with me ;-) if these seem dumb questions -

I have developed a new Actinic site for my client - the client has an existing e-commerce solution that uses SagePay but it is not integrated with his Sage Line 50 accounts.The new site will be integrated with Sage (using Actinic Link with Actinic order processing disabled) and SagePay.

I guess this must be a very common configuration given the profile of typical Sage & Actinic users..

Having reached the testing stage, I have a couple of questions:

1. Can anyone confirm whether or not the customer order email address is passed to Sage Line 50 via Actinic Link? As far as I can tell it is not.

My issue with this is how do we communicate with a customer once the order has been passed to Sage and ‘wiped’ from Actinic without an email address? We accept orders from unregistered customers, so don't have an email address for them.

2. As a kind of rider to this, I know (and have tested the fact) that SagePay sends a confirmation email to the customer when the order is placed - on validation of the credit card. But does anyone know whether it is possible to send an email via SagePay on completion (i.e shipping) of the order? SagePay say that it is possible but I can find no reference to how to do this anywhere in Actinic - the SagePay config options are minimalist to say the least.

As I can't test the full email scenario on the test system, can anyone with live experience of Sage Line 50, SagePay and Actinic link let me know how the email trail works?

Many thanks.

[jayzy1]

Hi,

We also use sage with actinic and bypas actinic order processing altogether whereby actinic takes the order, Link transfers this to sage, and sage takes over the order processing.

We toohave exactly the same problem where customers emails are not transferred (and no way of doing so as far as I know) so we have to copy n paste the email into sage for every single order.

From my experience with Link I think actinic have made this as a basic add on product that performs the the essential task of transferring the order/paymentdetails and product detals across only.
I do believe they are underestimating the number of users using it in conjunction with actinic and the need for added funtionality as it hasnt really changed much over the years.

I think link needs to be a more comprehensive software and welcome any developer who would take it on board and develop it further if actinic don't. I would be willing to pay for actinic link with enhanced functionality although I think it should be included within actinic.

In the past link has always been quite late to be released long after sage have released their annual updated version of sage. This is frustrating for the likes of us rendering sage updates useless until link is updated as well. (althoughthe timing was much better this year)

That's my view and hope it helps - and hope actinic take it on board.

Cheers

[alwest]

Thanks jayz1... I'm rather perplexed by your answer.

Surely, if Actinic Link doesn't hand on a crucial "detail" like email address it is not fit for purpose? I have logged a support request with Actinic, so let's see what they say..

Do you have any experience of SagePay and if/if not emails can be sent on completion (shipment) of the SagePay transaction?

[Sadcase]

Hi Alan,

We use Actinic Link to transfer orders to Sage Line 50 for processing; I can confirm that the email addresses are also sent through to Sage. If this is not happening in your case, make sure Actinic Link is set up correctly - the guide for Actinic Link is available online in the 'user guides' section.

No, you can't send an email to the customer when an order ships via SagePay, but you can send it from Actinic.

You mention Actinic 'wiping' an order; however in practise it doesn't do this. When you select an order in the 'Pending' tab in Actinic and then 'Export to files', it moves the order to the 'Completed' tab of the Orders section in Actinic. From here you can access all the information of the original order, and, presumably, send an order confirmation email when the order is shipped. (I say 'presumably' because we don't do this ourselves - but I assume it's possible (as there's an 'order shipped' email template in the design section of Actinic).)

[alwest]

Thanks Sadcase - I will look again at the setup of Actinic Link and at the possibility of emailing via Actinic.

You mention that email addresses are transferred - where in Sage do they end up? FYI, we are not creating a Sage customer from orders. Out of interest, what method do you use for sending email on shipping, if indeed you send one?

[Sadcase]

Right. I think I misunderstood you.

We create customer accounts in Sage from our orders in Actinic - and I reckon this is what Actinic Link is designed for.

When you export an order to Sage, if you include an account name in the 'External Reference' field in the customer details section of the order (maximum of 8 characters, upper case only), when the order is exported, it adds the order to that customer's account in Sage (if they already have an account). If no account with that name exists, Actinic Link will create an account with that reference in Sage, transferring all address, phone number and email address information to the new account. The email addresses end up in the email address field of the customer's account in Sage Line 50.

If you're not creating a customer account in Sage, then it will just post the information to an account that you have to nominate in Actinic Link (like 'Internet Sales' or something like that). However, from what I've seen, it should still post the address information to Sage somewhere.

Just out of interest, why aren't you creating a customer account in Sage, if you're doing all of the order processing there? If you do all the processing in Sage, but don't have individual customer accounts, how are you going to know where to send something?

Regarding emailing on shipping, we don't. However, we are looking into it and, if we proceed, we will send a shipping email from the completed order from within Actinic. However, I've got to look into this further.

[jayzy1]

Hi,

We do not create individual accounts for internet sales otherwise could run into thousands of unessary account records being created. All our orders get batched into one Sage account called Internet Orders. Link imports the order into this account and also imports the individual name adress & delivery details on a per order basis and overwrites the default one set up on the record.

Although this method brings in all the customer details like name, adress & tel
It has no facility to import the email. Not that I know of anyway unless someone can enlighten me.
We use parcelforce for shipping which automatically sends an email to the customer. but this means us painstakingly copying each email from actinic into sage into parcelforce.

Hope that helps