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[EricE]

Yep.. It's me again..

OK, here is a situation we have ran into and am unsure how to workaround.

We have a few customers that WE do drop shipping for and we also have alot of repeat customers.

Today we noticed that when trying to recall a previous order for one of our customers whom we drop ship for, we were unable to locate them because their name is only in the "bill to" section and for whatever reason no matter what search tool we used we could locate the customer unless we searched for the "ship to" name.

Within SM, how do we find our customer whom we drop ship for? Having to manually type in the information each time can be a bit of a drag...  Is it possible to incorporate a feature that would provide customers with their own unique number? Thus making repeat customer orders and order history easier to review? Possibly make this a feature that can be enabled / disabled like the ability to track inventory.


Problem #2 - When attempting to change the status of an order from Open to Backordered, the system reverts right back to open.  I can select any status variable except backorder... Am I missing something here?

Thanks!

[David Johns]

Eric,

On the first point - Let me make sure I understand you...  You take orders over the phone or email, etc... for people that dropship through you and you would like to not have to enter their information in the bill to fields each time?  Is that correct?   so there are a few things you can do.  First of all the "SuperFind" feature will find orders based on billing address only.  The trick is that the "Name" that is shown on the order list when the results are displayed is always the ship to name.  If you enter the name of the company you are dropshipping for almost all if not all the orders returned will be previous dropships from this customer.  You can then bring up one of their orders in the details screen.  If the first one isn't from them for some reason click on the filter button in between the previous and next arrows and click the previous button it will show the next one down on the list.

Another thing...the repeat orders list is populated based on billing information.  You can therefore easily see all the orders from that dropship customer right on the details screen.  You can even double click on it to go to that order.

Problem #2 - The statii are most often derived by conditions of the order.  For example if you try to change an order to "Shipped" but the shipments have not been set to shipped it will change it back.  It works the same with the backorders.  It is marked backordered because one or more of the items are marked backordered.  If you mark the item as no longer backordered the order will automatically change to closed.

Thanks,
David

[EricE]

Hi David,

I give up, where do we find the "repeat order list"  

[David Johns]

Eric,

One the order details screen on the right side next to the totals, listed as "Likely Repeats".

Thanks,
David

[EricE]

Hmmm... Ok...

Is there anyway that we can do a search for the "bill to" and have it pull up their information?  The likely repeats wont work for us.

While in the Orders section we tried to use the "Superfind" and it did not pull up any of their orders. Searching by "address" wont work too well because we would have to then ensure everyone who might process their orders knows their address so they can pull up a previous order to create the new one using their billing info..

The object is that when we receive the PO from the customer we can easily locate their "account" in SM and fill in the "ship to" information to create the drop ship order.  We dint mind pulling up an old order and creating a new order from that, the issue has been simply trying to locate their orders.

One of the thoughts i had was to create a dummy sales invoice where they are both the ship to and bill to, haven't tried that yet though..

Are there any plans in the future to  customers with their own unique customer number or at least the ability to enable such a feature?

Any feedback is greatly appreciated.. 

[David Johns]

Eric,

We made a decision early on in the development of SuperManager not to keep a list of customers and just have the orders link to them rather than have the address information stored.  The primary factors behind this were - if customers move we still wanted to have the information that was given for each previous order.  Once you make that determination storing customers in a separate location of the database just becomes additional storage overhead and most of it is duplication of information that already exists in the database somewhere.  Additionally you have to deal with the issues of determining if a customer from two different orders is the same or a new person.  Certainly there are rules you could follow to determine that with a reasonable degree of accuracy and then offer the ability to merge customers for those instances where it is hard to tell.

One thing that might shed some light on the situation: how are you searching?  Is this customer listed under the "Company" field and you are searching using the company name?  Is the company (or contact) listed under the name field?  How is this customer listed in the order and what keywords are you using to search?  Best thing would be to spell out how the customer is listed (you can change the names to preserve confidentiality - but if you do make the company name the same number of words and so forth):

Name: John Doe
Company: Doe's Motorcycles
Search Phrase: Doe

I have tested to ensure that if a name only appears in the bill to fields it will still return them when you SuperFind.  The one issue that makes it tough to decern it is working is that the name it lists is always the ship to address, making it hard to tell at first glance that the orders returned are in fact orders from Doe's Motocycles.  If you open the order details you will quick see whether they are and you can use the filter mechanism to go to the next order returned if not.

We don't currently have plans to develop a list of favorite customers but we are brainstorming how we can meet your needs.  We'll work with you to get something that works for you whether or not it is exactly as you are currently proposing.

Thanks,
David

[EricE]

Hi David,

Thanks for the reply.

Customer Name: Tom Smith
Company Name: Tom Performance Products
Search Phrase #1: Tom Performance Products
Search Phrase #2 performance products

One of the first issue's we ran into was that the system returned quite a few orders which had the term "products" in the comments section. Example Note - Product is on order

Would it be possible to add a search field in the "super filter" for "bill to"? that would easily solve the obstacle.


Now on the bright side of things.... I really appreciate how easy you have made it to modify invoices, we were able to customize an invoice template for each of our customers that we drop ship for as they each have different requirements for what they would like printed on their invoices..   Almost as if the invoices are coded in plain English.. Then again for web geeks it is plain English      This Is a huge advantage over the other software we were using; all of your variables actually work when called upon in a report.

[David Johns]

Eric,

I found the problem.  We added support for the company field a few months back when Yahoo added it to the export format.  We failed to get it added to the superfind, however.  I have fixed that and it will be available in the beta 1.1.2.3, which also includes the QuickBooks inventory import.  We are just finalizing testing on one of the functions we have improved and it will be sent out to you.

In the mean time if you search instead for "Tom Smith" it will find these orders.

Thanks,
David

[EricE]

Excellent... Look forward to seeing the new version...  my brother will be very happy..  He is the one experiencing the problems and he is not very computer literate.. Thus the program is broken to him LOL