If a customer is having
trouble building their own order online, the correct way to create an order on
behalf of your customer would be to use the "Order Entry" link found in the "Sales" section of Admin.epc
(aka the 'control panel). You click on the link and there you see 5 options for which you can use to
create orders.
1. Supplier Part Number: to be used when you know the supplier part number
(you can enter an OE number as well).
2. Our Part Number: To be used when it's one of your part numbers
that you manually added to the inventory master file.
3. Search Catalog: To be used when you need to search for an item by year, make, and model in a supplier's catalog...
4. Browse Our Catalog: to be used when you want to choose the item from your own inventory file. The items are grouped by category, category1, and level3.
5. Sales Rep Shopping Cart (beta): We are still working on this but it's meant for your sales reps to modify existing open or closed orders.
Use the links to start an order on behalf of a customer. These are what all your customer service representatives should be using to create orders in your store
as well. Starting from order entry creates a new customer record for each order.
When it comes time for checking out an order on behalf of your customer, be sure
to enter their email address, as the email address is essentially their
'customer number'. If you do not know their email address, or they will
not give you one, enter their phone number @ yoursite.com. For example,
you could enter 8885632591@sophio.com.
This is sophio's phone number. The next time a Sophio employee called you,
you could re-enter this email address and their bill to and ship to information
would be recalled.
On a final note, if you want
to add an item that is not currently in your supplier's catalog, or your own
catalog for that matter, you need only use the 'sales rep shopping cart' to add
the item. The sales rep shopping cart gives you blank fields for sku
(part number), category, price, etc. that you can enter. This info will be
added to the shopping cart. This is a good way to add an item that is a
special order, or an item you 'find' in your warehouse that you want to sell.
When you are done adding
items to the shopping cart you can then click checkout and proceed as normal.
The order can then be sent to the credit card processor just as if the consumer
entered the order themself.
