Can customer check order status?

[Mike Hughes]

I'm starting to lean towards a using a text file myself as the amount of data will be limited and it stops people having to worry about MySQL. I'm thinking of doing some sort of simple encryption to stop people viewing the whole file.

Mike

[rmladden]

I placed the file in a directory that has the permissions set so it is not viewable from the web, but the Perl script can still access it.

[Mike Hughes]

I guess that makes sense. At least we know all actinic users have a working cgi-bin.

Mike

[jxm28788]

But a facility for the customer to enter their order number and see a status message would be great, if we could add a custom message/status that would be even better. It would also need to have an e-mail button so they could contact us in the event of further query (automatically adding the order number to the e-mail subject)

I have several shipping options (courier, 1st class, 3-4 parcel) and which one the customer gets depends on which one they chose, but also they may get upgraded depending on the weight (if they chose 3-4 day, but it was light it would go first class mail, if it was heavy they'd get upgraded to courier). Therefore, I would need some way of not only saying 'order shipped' but choosing from a menu - 'order shipped by next day courier', 'order shipped by 1st class post' etc.

So I would see it working that I could select a bunch of orders and set them to 'next day', select another bunch and set them to '1st class' and then maybe select the odd one or two for a 'custom' message.

Not sure of the best way for them to select their order - they don't always fill in the telephone or may forget which number they used (mobile/home/work/fake), and they sometimes spell their e-mail incorrectly so won't always get the confirmation with the order number...

[rmladden]

My preprocessing script merges in some shipping information. Then I upload the file. It's all very custom.

I require the telephone number on orders. They can try all their numbers. If they can't manage that, they don't deserve to know about their order.

[jxm28788]

That would depend.

If it's just simple, say a rolling 30 day status on all orders, then I'd probably sell licences for something like £30/$50.

If you wanted a full status on previous orders, including items purchased in the past then it would have to be more like £60/$100.

What do you think? Would I get any takers?

Mike

So did anything ever come of this? We're a couple of years, and 2 versions further on and the 'order history' feature is still a) not available, and b) in big demand....

[Mike Hughes]

I haven't done anything on this. Too many other things to do.

Mike