Linux4Me Posted April 10, 2005 Posted April 10, 2005 how long does it take you , on average to process let say, 10 customer orders ? that might mean different things to different people, but id like to hear from others on what kind of time requirements they spend to fulfill their orders. ill be usig vendors to dropship most of my products and i started trying to estimate what kind of time requirements i would be looking at for manually processing lets say 50 orders, which seems like a lot to me for one day. by "manually", i mean calling the vendor, giving the info and recording things on myside. its my hope that the suppliers i a paln to work with will at least have email, but i can already expect that some will not even be computer-savy at all. as long as they have email, things will be smoother, but like i said there will most likely be a mix. thoughts & comments welcome
Guest Posted April 10, 2005 Posted April 10, 2005 why not ask your vendors if you can process your orders via email? and then email the orders to them automatically as they come in, wher the order # becomes your purchase order number? and then using TurboCash, you can import your orders into the accounting, processing everything, and also in TurboCash use the purchase order side to keep it all together.
walkman Posted April 11, 2005 Posted April 11, 2005 It takes us about an hour to fulfill 10-15 customer orders internally which includes processing into our accounting system, printing packing slips, picking and packing, and applying postage to the shipment. We have automated the flow of information between the systems as much as possible. It's a huge time saver to avoid duplicate data entry. Fullfillment should be easier for you since you don't have to handle physical goods. But you are going to have to require your suppliers accept your orders via email -- or provide you with an on-line order process. I would think that it would be much more efficient for them too to avoid phone calls. Then you need to automate the sending of the emails to your vendors that it doesn't require action from you. You also need to require that your suppliers send you email confirmation when they ship the order. And try to write a perl script to parse the emails they send you so you can automate the update of the order status in your software. Then once a day, you can check on the status to see if there are any items that require your attention.
Linux4Me Posted April 11, 2005 Author Posted April 11, 2005 walkman, i like your idea of a perl script to parse the email from suppliers. as an alternative, how about providing each supplier a login that allows them to access a single page on your site. this page could list the orders for which they are shipping items. they could mark a checkbox to set their status to "shipped". then the main customers > orders page (that the store owner uses) which list orders could be modified to list the status of each suplier for the order. comments welcome
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