Streamling our business with Cubecart

[Guest]

Okay, I've been struggling this year with a growing business and trying to find ways to better streamline my operations so I can track things easier and be better prepared for more growth, so I thought I'd start a topic where we can discuss ways to make our businesses work - with cubecart as the heart of the operation of course.

Currently, this is my overview of how I do things along with the problems each has - how do you do it? Do you know of a program or something else that will make things easier? Maybe together we can figure out ways to make our business more efficient so we aren't spending 20 hours a day in front of a keyboard

1. I have 8 cubecart stores that feed credit card information to mals-ecommerce where I daily check orders, printing them out from the cubecart store, checking the item availability, charging the customer (via Paypal Virtual Terminal), and updating the status in cubecart. I then delete the mals data.

2. I enter the details into Quickbooks Pro 2006 in their sales receipt (don't use invoices since sales receipt posts the payment data at the same time as I enter it eliminiating 2 steps of receiving payments/depositing them in the bank).

3. I sync with Quickbooks Customer Manager v2 which imports all the customer contact information. It doesn't however, import items ordered, order number, or other information so I have to manually do that with each order. I enter each item ordered as a to do item in QCM which gives me an ongoing list of what I need to order from distributors (I mark the item done when I order it, unmark it complete if the item ends up being backordered). I then file the printout in my current file alphabetically by customers last name.

(steps 2 & 3 take up the biggest chunk of my time)

4. I order from my suppliers typing info from the QCM to do list into emails (or faxes) and send off to my vendors.

5. When shipments come in 2-7 days later, I do a search in QCM to figure out who the item is for and pull their paperwork from my current file. I ship it priority mail and clip my copy of the receipt to the customer printout and file it in my completed file (again by last name). The carrier picks up every day to get my packages.

6. I open the order in QCM and mark it complete.

7. I post the bill from the vendor into Quickbooks.

8. Once a month, I download my Paypal transaction file into a temporary account into QB comparing what isn't posted there yet and move the missing ones into my main Paypal account file. Usually its the postage that isn't in there yet.

My biggest problem is in following up on orders - especially items that are backordered. QCM doesn't have a way to flag you to follow up on anything really and I have a bad tendancy to lose track of time (so I think an order has been pending for a few days then discover it's been a few weeks more often than I care to admit). It also doesn't pull dates in so when I search for item x, it may pull up 30 times that item has been ordered and I have to open each one til I find the actual current order.

Ideally, I'd like each new order to flag me somehow (send an email, pop open an outlook reminder, or probably ideally make up a todo list) say 5 days after the order was placed if it's not marked "completed" yet so I can recheck that the item is on its' way or in or notify the customer if it's backordered, whatever. Setting a reminder in Outlook for each order is one way to do it of course, but the problem is that it adds yet another step and on days when I get 10 or more new orders, it gets very easy to forget that step. So some orders are falling thru the cracks I'd also love one list of orders that are now 5 days (10 days whatever) out so I can check each one like a to do list.

So I'm thinking of replacing QCM with something more specific for my needs, but cannot figure out what. I took a look at Outlooks Business Contact Manager thing and it's worse than QCM, so that wasn't a solution.

I don't know much about mysql so don't know if it's possible to pull more of the data directly from the database and somehow use it to do more steps for me? Perhaps creating an access database (which I haven't done in AGES and never did anything complex in it) but not sure if it can pull info from mysql?

Also not sure if any of this might be able to be modded into cubecart??? As I was typing this I got that idea actually - perhaps cubecart could email the administrator with links to any orders that are not marked completed x days after initial order date???

As a one person operation, the more I can automate, the better!

So that's my lengthy explanation of how I currently do things - what do you do and any suggestions for all of us?

[Guest Arild]

Very good post, and it make me think how to do it when i get my shop(s) ready.

As i can see in your post you are using a lot of different solution for doing different things. The basic should be to intregate most of the order/restock/payment into CC.

And in order management there are a lot missing, and a complete solution would be nice to have in the CC.

As:

Partly delivered order management.

Option for restock of products. You spesify max/min values in product options, with possible to take out list.

Notification on orders that have not changed status in xx days. all levels of status. global option and order override.

Better export options.

Easy to customize labels. For print out adress card, freight labels, freight paper......

Hopefully we are getting i good discusion and come up with improvment to avoid most of the manual handeling...

[Guest]

I agree, all the areas you discuss are needed, though personally I don't have a problem with restock of products. I only stock a few things - I carry about 20,000+ items among my various stores ordering items when customers order them for the most part, so this isn't a factor in my particular business. Quickbooks does have an inventory function that can let you know when you need to reorder items you are low on, etc, so that is already handled really (I just don't use it - I keep my limited inventory in excel as I find it easier to search when I need to see if I have something in stock or not).

Labels also aren't a problem - I ship everything via priority mail and paypal ships priority mail (and ups for that matter) labels directly from the customer record. I just search for the customer name or email in paypal, click on "print shipping label" and fill out weight, etc. and I'm done.

The notification on delayed orders is my biggy and after I finish updating all my stores to 3.0.13, I am going to work on ideas for doing this. I *think* I might be able to do it (with help) with cubecart, which would be a big problem solved.

I am thinking about trying the express payments or ipn or whatever it is called paypal option after I finish the upgrades too - at least for a few of my sites. I like manually checking orders before I run credit cards, but realize that if paypal processes them automatically for me, this would cut down a big chunk of time. Just afraid I might have to do a lot of refunds, but figured I will test it on a few sites.

But I'm still looking for other ideas too :blink: