Drop-shipping system - please advise
We have an online store that uses drop-shipping to send goods from our suppliers based in the US to our customers based in the UK and Europe. We are starting to get a consistently large quantity of orders through and we need a more automated system to send the order requests to our US suppliers.
At the moment we're retrieving the orders in Actinic, selecting the latest batch from the orders list and clicking "ReExport to files". We are then manually opening the .XLS files in Excel and copying and pasting various parts of each order from various files, into the main spreadsheet file to send to our supplier. This file contains the order number, SKU, supplier price ($), short product description(s) and quantities, date, customer name, customer address & customer e-mail.
This takes far too long to do on a daily basis, especially with increasing numbers of sales. What I'd like to do is implement an automated system which automatically exports our Actinic orders, either in realtime or on a daily basis, to a database linked to a secure web server that can be accessed by our team and our suppliers via a login and password. The site will display a clear list of transactions with all the data we require.
In this way our suppliers can access the transactions instantly and invoice us straight away. It cuts out the time consuming copy and paste jobs in Excel and prevents human error. If possible I'd also like an export facility on the site that can export transactions to a CSV or XLS file, rather like with online banking. It would also be good to have extra fields so the supplier could tick a box for shipped, backorder etc. and perhaps enter tracking details in a text field for everyone's reference.
I know there are a lot of specifics here, but the system must do all these things. I'd like some advice about which combination of plugin(s) I can use for Actinic to be able to do this. I know it is technically possible, and I know there are some good plugins out there by Mole End, Codepath etc. If plugins would still require a lot of extra work, could someone code this for me? We need it pretty quick and are willing to pay if the price is reasonable.
Matt
At the moment we're retrieving the orders in Actinic, selecting the latest batch from the orders list and clicking "ReExport to files". We are then manually opening the .XLS files in Excel and copying and pasting various parts of each order from various files, into the main spreadsheet file to send to our supplier. This file contains the order number, SKU, supplier price ($), short product description(s) and quantities, date, customer name, customer address & customer e-mail.
This takes far too long to do on a daily basis, especially with increasing numbers of sales. What I'd like to do is implement an automated system which automatically exports our Actinic orders, either in realtime or on a daily basis, to a database linked to a secure web server that can be accessed by our team and our suppliers via a login and password. The site will display a clear list of transactions with all the data we require.
In this way our suppliers can access the transactions instantly and invoice us straight away. It cuts out the time consuming copy and paste jobs in Excel and prevents human error. If possible I'd also like an export facility on the site that can export transactions to a CSV or XLS file, rather like with online banking. It would also be good to have extra fields so the supplier could tick a box for shipped, backorder etc. and perhaps enter tracking details in a text field for everyone's reference.
I know there are a lot of specifics here, but the system must do all these things. I'd like some advice about which combination of plugin(s) I can use for Actinic to be able to do this. I know it is technically possible, and I know there are some good plugins out there by Mole End, Codepath etc. If plugins would still require a lot of extra work, could someone code this for me? We need it pretty quick and are willing to pay if the price is reasonable.
Matt
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