3 replies to this topic

[borisr]

Hi everybody

On one hand it's a pleasure to see your own shop to grow fast, on the other hand, this causes new issues..
With more than 20/30 orders/day and several persons involved in customer service, it beginns to be somewhat tricky to have an overivew on all requests if one's customer service is based on Outlook..

Are there any contribs/adds which can help with this issue?

My idea was:

To generate a code(reference) with every order which is contained in the order confirmation mail (subject and text part) (same code to be added to every message sent from osCommerce in the order-detail page). In those mails I would ask our customers to leave the code in all replay emails (I know, not everybody will do so, but also if only 80% follow the request it would make the whole thing easier..).
Incoming mails would then be checked if they contain such a code and if so, added to the order history of the respective order(or a special table to be added additionally).
IF such an email is added to the order, status would automatically by changed to something like "new message". If then the display of existing orders could be sorted by status - which shoudn't be an issue - that would allow to easily handle new requests while always having a good overview on the order history.

If something like that doesn't exist but someone would be interested in such a functionality and willing to share developpement efforts, I'd be happy to join forces.

Edited by borisr, 11 March 2010, 10:59.

[cannuck1964]

Sugar CRM is a free GPL based project.

To create an export to dump your customers from osC into Sugar is not complex.

If you want to include your products and orders, they you need to upgrade to paid for versions of sugar.

TigerCRM is another, I have been told it too can have imports, but have not looked into it much...

cheers,

Edited by cannuck1964, 11 March 2010, 17:15.

[bruyndoncx]

do you really need to go the full CRM route if all you want to do is integrate the incoming emails in the order history ?

[cannuck1964]

the problem with this approach is that emails are handled by the server and php does not have a way to get these emails from the server very easily. Once that issue is over come, they you need to parse the email subject line and look for order info (your special code). Then the email has to be associated with the order itself.

It would be trivial to just add comments from the customer to the order comments within the osC framework, but to have a php application get the email from the server in some automated fashion will not be a simple matter.

There are systems out that that would do this association and reading of the emails, but I would imagine they are loaded as part of the server software rather then as an attachment to the cart system. I would look for an open source app that does this already, then look to modify it to attach the body of the email to the associated order.

You would need to run this as a CRON (at a minimum) or as a resident apache module (RPM) which would run continuously.

Just some thoughts on it....

cheers