Online order tracking

[Jan]

I'm thinking of writing something to allow an orders current status to be displayed on the web site, something along the lines of the parcelforce tracking system where you enter a unique id and a shipped date and it tells you where that item is in the parcelforce world. For Actinic it would just be the order number that was entered and it would then say when it was ordered, the payment status, the shipping status, whether it has been backordered and so on. No personal information would be included.

Can anyone suggest any essential information to include or even point out anything that really should be excluded?

Can anyone see any legal problems with this?

It might be better to send replies by email (tracking@mole-end.biz) rather than posting here.

Regards,

[garyhay]

Jan

We thought about implementing this but sometimes we don't know ourselves where the orders are as they can come straight from suppliers.

You could just provide a link (or embed) the tracking system from the courier company in an include file.

[Jan]

Hi Gary,

I can see your point, what happens if you don't ship directly, does the supplier notify you when they ship an item or do you just have to assume that they will and/or have sent it. It must make it very difficult to mark an item as shipped on the catalog and get it moved over to the completed tab if you don't know whether it has gone or not.

You could just provide a link (or embed) the tracking system from the courier company in an include file.

I'm not really trying to show the location of the shipped item, more the status of the item before it is shipped. It's a peace of mind thing for the customer as much as anything else.

[garyhay]

Most of our (well my clients) goods are shipped direct within a day or two of the order. We just answer e-mails on order status if asked. We also make sure the purchaser is informed of any problems with the order (discontinued, out of stock) a quickly as possible.

I'm not really trying to show the location of the shipped item, more the status of the item before it is shipped. It's a peace of mind thing for the customer as much as anything else.

Longest wait for shipping is about a week. I would just let the customer phone in to be honest as I think offering this service may cause extra unwanted load on the server.

[murf]

We'll buy it Jan.............

[Jan]

:-)