Displaying List of Orders/Transactions for Suppliers

[tattysilver]

Our sites work on a drop-shipping basis, so all our orders need to be passed onto our suppliers regularly for them to dispatch to our customers direct.

Would it be possible in Actinic to set up a page within our site that displays a list of orders (order num, customer name, address, item, quantity etc.), that updates automatically every time there is a new transaction? If it isn't possible automatically, would it be possible on a basis whereby we can upload the latest transactions as and when? Some kind of "TransactionList" variable that can be inserted into a fragment on a page only accessible by our suppliers using a login/password, for example?

It would make it so much easier for us if our suppliers could access such transactions so we don't have to keep forwarding orders onto them whenever we receive them. If it isn't possible in the above way, has anyone got any alternative suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Matt.

[Cheapprices4u]

codepath have such a plugin

Actinic Drop-Shipping

Configure a list of distribution centres and define which Actinic products each one ships. Your Actinic orders can then be analysed and only the appropriate order lines made available to each distribution centre.

Choose from either an e-mail solution, where the distribution centre is emailed an order advice, or have the order data published to a web-based database (shown here) to give you and your distribution centre a near-live view of the shipping status of your orders.

[tattysilver]

Thanks for that, looks like it might be just what we need. Are there any alternative ways in Actinic to do this? I can't seem to find any variables that display one order, let alone the full list. If I can do this from within Actinic it will save me £149 and at the moment only one supplier is used for each site so I'd only be using a fraction of the functionality this plugin has to offer.

All I really need is to be able to display the orders in a list on a page; I can code the rest so that it's only visible to our suppliers. Any ideas?

Matt.

[Jan]

Oddly enough, for £150 I can sell you a plugin to do what you want - but not the one you have already looked at :-)

Actually I can suggest four additional ways of doing this,

1) In Actinic there is an option to also send the confirmation emails to additional email addresses, it's in settings / business settings / ordering, and is called send email copies to.

2) You can export Actinic orders to a set of files (there are around five altogether, enable export in business settings and then right click and export), could you send these to your supplier - they or you would have to modify the order details so that they were in a more usable format.

3) My One Stop Automation will send them as they arrive and you can attach an email or include the order details in the email, more details and a free trial can be found here :

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/One...r-Actinic.html

4) My One Stop Order Processing tool can also send emails to a third party and it can export your orders to a CSV that you can then upload to a server, fax to your supplier or email to your supplier. You can find more details and a free trial here :

http://www.mole-end.biz/acatalog/One...ssing.html#aQO

Things to keep in mind when looking at the solutions:

- most importantly, emails get lost, it's quite normal as far as I can tell for them not to arrive. So should you be relying on them.

- are you going to always have just one supplier, if not then the codepath solution is the best and then manually emailing from Actinic or One stop order processing second best.

- if you use the Actinic copy emails, remember that sometimes, if the shopper doesn't click on the done button after paying the email isn't sent (but you can send the same emails from within Actinic manually, so maybe that would be the solution).

Regards,