Remote access for fulfilment house?

[rissahu]

Hi all, am currently considering the use of a fulfilment house for our site but am coming unstuck at the part where they need access to the orders.

Is there a way they could access my actinic orders remotely - we will be in the same town most of the time (unless I'm away) but not in the same building so can't use a shared drive.

Am considering moving away from Actinic totally unless I can get this to work - something that fills me with dread but I can't see it working otherwise

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Duncan Rounding]

There's two possible solutions.
One to set Actinic to email the order copy to them or automatically send then a pdf (contact Mole-End for this).
The other is to also install Actinic at their offices and allow them to download orders there whilst you keep your Actinic installation to maintain the products and design.

[Goz]

Codepath also do a drop-ship plug-in. Not used it and don't know how it works but it might be worth a look.

http://www.codepath.co.uk/actinic_plugins.htm

[rissahu]

Thanks for the swift replies.

Ideally I'd like them to be able to access the orders as and when they come in rather than me having to keep my version open and ready to send them through (as it won't work if I'm out of the country for example)

Also what happens if I add new products on my machine - do I need to update their version to allow them to process orders for the new products?

Will investigate the drop ship plug in too - thanks.

[Duncan Rounding]

You can install Actinic on a PC at their offices so they can download orders there. Import your snapshot onto that other machine periodically. The downloaded orders contain all the order information required. So as long as they don't need to modify orders involving the product changes not yet imported you should be fine.

[rissahu]

Great, that was my biggest concern! Is there a way I can stop the fulfilment machine from uploading changes at all?

However this would mean I had no access to order at all wouldn't it? As we also sell digital downloads this could prove an issue as I often get queries with people asking for download links to be resent which I couldn't do. Also if I was dealing with "where's my order" queries I couldn't see the order could I?

Thinking maybe the Mole End Automation/One Stop Processing (also sell on ebay) might be better which would then solve the product changes issue as a snapshot could be imported more easily if the master machine was with me, and I would still have access to orders to deal with those sorts of queries.

Does anyone else have this sort of setup and could help?

Thanks for the advice so far!

[Duncan Rounding]

You can configure access options (not password protected mind) to include or/and exclude:
Catalog Maintenance
Network Setup
Order Processing
Design Changes

[FrazerPart]

There's two possible solutions.
One to set Actinic to email the order copy to them or automatically send then a pdf (contact Mole-End for this).
The other is to also install Actinic at their offices and allow them to download orders there whilst you keep your Actinic installation to maintain the products and design.

Duncan,
how difficult is it to get v9 to send a copy of the order to an email address? This is something that I'd like to introduce......

[Duncan Rounding]

It can do that by default - in Business Settings - Order tab.

[FrazerPart]

thanks Duncan!
Just seen that feature and entered an email address

[Mike Hughes]

It's worth being aware that emails often don't get sent. Typically when a customer doesn't return to the receipt page on the website after paying. Paypal is notorious for this but it sometimes happens with other psps as well.

It will be fine most of the time but you need to be aware that you won't always get the order email and have a system in place to try and avoid too many customers chasing you for their stuff.

For remote order access and catalog maintenance from more than one PC then an online catalog solution might make more sense. Actinic have been announcing new stuff in this space including a migration tool to make it easier to make the move. Not sure when it's all going live but it might be worth investigating.

Mike

[PatchworkRabbit]

Or you can install Logmein or similar, but that would give them access to everything on your PC...

[chris ashdown]

Will the drop shipper be sending out the goods prior to you taking the money if you are away, or do you have a method of checking the orders for say third man and taking the money upon dispatch

[Jan]

We export our orders into two formats and send them over to our drop shipper at two set times each day, they import these files into their warehousing system and into ukmail's consignor and send them out the same day. They then send up an email at the end of each day with a list of consignments sent and send a stock reconciliation report at the end of each week.

It works well, plenty of opportunity for double checking. We have had very few problems, maybe three mistakes out of several thousand orders.

[Clive.Aspen]

Hi Jan,

We export our orders into two formats and send them over to our drop shipper at two set times each day,

How do you export the orders in a format easily used by your fullfilment house?