Canada Post and restocking times *my first store*

[Compactman]

Hello all I own a Comptuer Store here in Welland Ontario with my partner and Ive been doing all the work to setup an online store. I have a couple of questions just to put my mind at ease about all this it is pretty hectic.

 

I have sent an email to canada post about getting the application for a user and password to use the Canada Post module to do all of our shipping but I have yet to get any information from them yet. Couple of questions.

 

1. Through this module does the shipping charges go directly to Canada Post or to us and then we pay Canada post as we ship items?

2. Does Canada post have some kind of software or documentation package they will give us for selling online besides whats on the website?

3. Do they come to the computer store to pickup orders when we tell them or are they just gong to show up unexpectedly? Or do we bring all of our packages to them?

 

We are a small computer store so we don't keep much in stock mostly because we can't afford it yet. My partner travels to our wholesalers once a week to pickup orders we sell instore.. Now whats the best way to let my customers for the Online Store understand this so that if they pick nextday shipping chances are its not going to be there the next day.

 

I'm sure there is more I'm forgetting but this community seems pretty great as far as helping eachother out. :lol:

[halbert]

Some answers to your questions (I'm using the same mod)

 

1) you collect the fee... you can also have CP set up a handling fee that's added to the postage fee shown (without using an OSC module to do that). The mod is meant to help you figure out the cost of mailing the package.

 

2) go to the Sell Online part of the Canada Post site for more details. You can read more there. Be warned, I find their documentation rather poor. You will also get a big bundle of documents from CP once your application has been processed.

 

3) You can arrange pickups, but there's a fee for this, and you need to have a certain minimum number of packages per month.

 

4) As for shipping times, be sure to specify that your orders are shipped on Day X every week, and the shipping times (ie: overnight) will be based on the shipping day, not the order day.

 

Hope this helps

 

-al

[Compactman]

2 more heh

 

I'm not sure how to setup the credit card stuff but I do know that every time someone uses a credit card at the store the credit card company tacks on 3% of the item to our bill...

 

Is there a guide to setting up OS commerce with credit cards?

 

Last question.. I promise..

 

If a user was to create an account there is no field for them to select what province they are from.. Is there a mod to add an extra field in there? As far as I can tell the guide I followed for all the GST/HST/PST stuff choses by postal code? I'm not sure..

 

Do you need to know the province when shipping products to customers or just the postal code?

[halbert]

Credit cards... the short answer is No, there is no guide to setting up OSC with credit cards because there are so many different ways of doing it.

 

The long of it is you need 2 different parts. You need a Merchant Account from your bank of choice which allows you to accept credit cards through their little swipey thing or via phone-in authorization. You also need a payment gateway company to allow you to send credit card transactions through the internet and have them verified for your merchant account.

 

There are many different merchant accounts, and each one has a different discount rate (the 2.9% to 5.5% you get dinged for the privilege of using the cards). They will also charge you a monthly fee for having the account.

 

The payment gateway companies also charge you, but usually a flat-fee per transaction. Plus a monthly fee.

 

You could get away without having a payment gateway by collecting the cc number and info, and then manually entering it into a swipe machine a la mail order as well.

 

The options can get expensive, depending on your volume. You can also find companies that offer credit-card payments by you using their existing account and gateway. They charge a higher discount rate and transaction fee than having your own, but it may work out cheaper for low-volumes.

 

Or you can use something like Paypal, Hyperwallet, or any multitude of other email payment systems out there. They will have relatively high discount rates and fees but they're simple to start with.

 

As for shipping - when you make an account in OSC you generally have to enter a province or state as well as postal code. This can be set up with the Admin tool (Configuration - Customer Details).

 

You probably only need the code to figure out the province they're in but that's a bit of a pain. The CP mod uses the postal codes to work out the rates.

 

Hope this helps

 

-al

[Compactman]

Ahh thanks so much.. We have chosen to enter in the credit cards manually at the storefront because it will be easier in the long run to combine the online store with the real store in our quickbooks program.

 

 

I'm on my way to building.. I have started adding products but it is taking quite a bit of time entering in every single product we sell.

 

I found modules to allow me to change the prices and everything about the product once its entered quickly by showing all the products per catagory on one page with edit fields but adding them to the shop in the first place is a task..

 

cause you gotta think we sell Maxtor, western digital and seagate hard drives.. so you gotta enter in each one and then each level.. 20, 40 60 80 all the way up to 250 gigs lol.. I'm just about done hard drives today.. Next up will be processors...