3rd party fulfilment: snapshot needed upon product changes?

[DiegoFuego]

Hi,

just looking into fulfilment options for my client and they want to use a 3rd party for packing and posting. Having just spoken to Actinic support, it appears that I can install Catalog at both my client and the fulfilment house, then check/uncheck options to process the orders accordingly. Great.

However, support mentioned that we will need to take a snapshot of the client's Catalog, then send this to the fulfilment house to import. No problem.

It's just occured to me that (obviously) my client is going to want to make changes to keep products up to date, so will they need to send a snapshot to the fulfilment house every time they make a change?

Thanks for your thoughts!

[jont]

Snapshots need to be synchronised before downloading an order as Actinic will inform of different files on the server.

If it is just for order raising and despatching how about possibly adding the supplier into the email receipts?

[Jan]

Actually Jonty, I don't think that is necessarily the case, Actinic will download all orders that it finds on the website, so if you are using split order processing you can have a totally different catalog on the upload and the download machine.

You may have problems if you want to use any of the following features of Actinic

a) Stock control
b) Customer accounts
c) Offline ordering

You must also make sure that the Actinic versions of the same on the upload and download machine, if they are different you will get the message Jonty mentioned.

Regards,

[DiegoFuego]

Thanks - Jan we're not using customer accounts but stock control might be an issue, offline ordering a vague possibility.

I've not really looked into the workings of the snapshot but I'm guessing in this scenario the fulfilment end just needs connection settings in order to retrieve the orders. My concern was that the fulfilment end would need to hold product data locally - I'm hoping/assuming that this isn't a requirement because all the relevant data should be contained in the order info retrieved from the site.

Have to apologise for what may seem like obvious questions - I'm working blind as we have not yet set up the system for testing order processing, and I'm an Actinic newbie. I'm just trying to cover as many bases as possible before we start!

My other alternative is to just forget Actinic for order processing and sort out my own data transfer to the fulfilment house. We're using Secure Hosting (SH) for the payment processing, and I've done this before with my own shopping cart where we harvest the order info via callback from SH then punt it over to fulfilment in a csv file each night. Kind of defeats the object of at least half of Actinic though...

[Jan]

The usual way to do what you are trying to do would be to only have Actinic at your clients site and then to send the order information over to the fullfillment house.

You can send the order information over in several ways :

a) fax the printed order
b) email the order details (plugins probably required)
c) export the order details to file and send the file to the warehouse (can be done with the standard Actinc export but we also have a plugin that makes it easier).

This would allow your customer to use stock control and place offline orders but more importantly to retain control of the orders, if the orders are downloaded at the warehouse, he will never see them which will make answering phone enquiries very hard.

Regards,

Regards,

[DiegoFuego]

Thanks Jan,

I was under the impression that details of the order were sent via email to the client upon completion of the card transaction. Could I not just get this forwarded on to fulfilment, or sent to an email group in the first place so that all relevant parties get it at the same time?

Your mention of a plugin to send an email with the order details suggests that only a *notification* email is sent following a successful card transaction. Please could you clarify? Thanks again.

[Jan]

So long as you are sure that all of the details you need are included in the emails and the emails are always sent you could do this, there is a cc option in the business settings to get orders set to one or more email addresses at the same time as sending the confirmation email.

I seem to recall that not all required details are included in the confirmation email but I have checked mine and they seem fine.

Some PSP's don't automatically return to actinic after a payment has been taken - worldpay for example - and if this happens the confirmation email is not dispatched.

Regards,

[DiegoFuego]

OK, I've just set up a free trial store (sorry, ought to have done so earlier!) and run a couple of sales through to see the confirmation emails - they seem to be fine in terms of the content for fulfilment. I'm assuming (hoping) that our PSP does return to Actinic after a sale - we are using Secure Hosting and I've just logged the question with them.

Unfortunately the demo doesn't seem to go as far as letting me download my fictitious orders. I was hoping to check out the data export functionality as a second option in case the email method is a no-go. Jan, I know you have a plugin for this, can you briefly let me know how it extends Actinic's built-in export and whether it would suit my needs - you might even get a sale out of it!

Thanks.