Product Review: Stone Edge Order Manager for ShopSite

About five years into the e-commerce revolution, we've seen shopping cart programs evolve into entire store-building and order systems that allow a high degree of flexibility and merchandizing sophistication. For small merchants, however, there remains an important gap -- adequate order tracking and fulfillment software.

Dydacomp's excellent Mail Order Manager software (M.O.M. http://www.dydacomp.com) has tried to fill this gap through integration of M.O.M. with their SiteLink product, but, at this writing, SiteLink has a long way to go to bring it up to speed with other e-commerce storefronts. Higher end software either integrates with larger companies' legacy software or provides order fulfillment capability itself. QuickBooks provides excellent small business multi-purpose accounting software, but isn't really designed for retail order fulfillment. The small online merchant hasn't really had much choice besides write-it-yourself.

I am excited about Stone Edge Technologies' Order Manager for ShopSite The 30,000+Market ShopSite merchants (for ShopSite versions 4.1 through 4.3) now have Windows 95+ desktop software that can import order files downloaded directly from ShopSite. I expect that soon Order Manager will develop modules able to import order files from a variety of e-commerce applications.

Order Manager requires Microsoft Access 97 or Access 2000. This platform gives Order Manager a great deal of flexibility, both in reporting capabilities, but also file compatibility, so that users can connect to inventory, product, and customer files if they already have them set up in other ODBC compatible database or spreadsheet systems. Order Manager can also be run from multiple workstations on a network and comes with a 5-user license.

Set-Up and Importing

I found set-up of Order Manager pretty straightforward. ShopSite tab-delimited order files are downloaded into a special order directory. When the latest order file is imported, it is automatically renamed and moved to an archive directory for back-up purposes.

A Setup Wizard takes information on store name, inventory information (if any), payment gateway (if any), primary supplier, shipping set-up, report printing, and drop-shippers. If you are selling services, Order Manager can be set to assume that all products are shipped immediately and does not decrease inventory for each sale. Otherwise, the program keeps track of inventory on hand as orders are filled.

While a number of online order tracking systems are available, notably with ShopSite TX (which uses theMarket Transact platform), FreeMerchant.com, and Yahoo! Store, some of these begin to break down when items need to be backordered and sent out on partially filled invoices. While Order Manager doesn't provide customers online access to order tracking like ShopSite TX, I believe Order Manager provides superior order handling capability for the merchant compared to TX.

Processing Incoming Orders

When orders for the day are imported, Order Manager prints out a "Pick List" of the inventory items needed to fill the new orders, including SKU, item name, quantities needed, shelf location of each item (if that information has been entered), and space for order-picker to confirm the quantities and pencil any notes that are needed on the printout.

View Orders

The merchant goes to the View and Approve Orders screen each day, the "command center" of Order Manager. This filters orders into Pending, Incomplete Orders, or All Orders.

You can set up Order Manager to automatically approve certain types of orders, such as orders that have no "special instructions" or orders for which all items are in stock. Using the Pending Orders view, the merchant would examine orders that hadn't been automatically approved.

A variety of actions can be initiated from this screen, including:

• Return
• Exchange
• Delete
• Cancel Backorder
• Force Backorder
• Revise Line Item
• Add Line Item
• Fill Back Orders
• Adjust Quantity On Hand (Inventory)
• Recalculate tax, shipping, and credit due for partial orders.

Other functions for view orders include:

• Print
• Approve Order
• Cancel Entire Order
• Add Orders Manually, for phone, fax, and mail orders.

The order search function offers tremendous power, providing a search on nearly any field in an order. You can search for ranges of dates and order numbers. You can also search by order status: any status, balance due, credit due, and paid in full, or by product SKU.

View Orders has a number of tabs or ways of viewing the order data, each of which allow the merchant to edit selected portions of order information. Views include:

• Pricing. Shows price, tax, shipping, etc., and allows editing of fields. Displays credit card information.
• Address and Shipping. Displays billing and shipping addresses, and shipping method. Allows the merchant to edit these fields, and view customer order history.
• Comments and Instructions. Displays ordering instructions and comments the customer entered during the ordering process, and provides space for a gift message for the packing slip, or notes to print on the sales slip.
• Notes. Provides a space where the merchant can insert private notes on how a particular order was handled, or information from customer e-mail or phone calls about the order.
• Ship Dates. Here the merchant can indicate expected and actual shipping dates.
• Drop-Ships. Provides information on which items were ordered from which supplier, the drop-ship order number and date, etc., so the order can be tracked if the customer has a problem with the order.

Fulfillment Document Printing

While Order Manager enables you to print individual items from the View Order screen, for most days, you'll batch print after going through and approving the day's orders. Order Manager produces sales receipts, packing slips, shipping labels, and credit slips to insert in packing containers or to mail to customers.

Inventory and Suppliers

In the inventory table, each product includes a good bit of detailed information to speed picking from stock, drop-shipping, and back ordering. Items which are kept in inventory show the amount on hand, quantity backordered, the point at which a order should be placed, and how many items should be ordered automatically when that inventory level is reached. A preferred supplier for each product is also indicated.

Your catalog items which are drop-shipped are indicated for each product -- for many Internet stores, this is nearly all products. The supplier for each product shows the preferred type of drop-ship ordering method that should be used (if any) -- print for mailing, print for faxing, fax automatically (using WinFax Pro), or e-mail automatically. In addition, the system stores an order template specific to that supplier (or a default template). The last page of the standard templates can be used as a packing slip, showing the merchant's company name (not the supplier’s), so it will appear that the order was shipped from your company.

Order Manager is designed to interface easily with UPS WorldShip software that produces labels with bar codes, ready for truck pick-up so that retyping of names and addresses is unnecessary. WorldShip is a free desktop program that UPS makes available to their shippers.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Order Manager is currently under active development and improvement. Moreover, since it is written in ansystem such as Microsoft Access, data tables are accessible and reports customizable to meet specialized needs. I see Order Manager as a very capable order fulfillment option, priced for small businesses at $395. While Dydacomp Mail Order Manager has the advantage of testing and development with all kinds of users over more than a decade, it costs thousands of dollars depending upon which modules you select.

Order Manager, however, still has a number of weaknesses. At present Order Manager's interface with your accounting system is weak -- a print-out of accounting information for transfer. A nice, but currently unavailable, feature would be .iff import into QuickBooks, the most popular small business software. Order Manager has much more capable order-handling features than QuickBooks itself, but purchase orders from vendors would need to be tracked and paid through QuickBooks. Since QuickBooks has a limit on the number of invoices it can handle, most active online stores would want to import summary sales information into QuickBooks, and keep customer and customer order data only in Order Manager. Not available at present.

Nor does Order Manager have any easy or automatic way to inform customers when an item has been shipped or backordered, a serious lack that I expect will be added in future versions. Similarly, while the database includes information for reordering inventory, there is no easy or automatic way to prepare purchase orders for regular restocking, only for backordering. Other hoped-for extensions to Order Manager would be compatibility with shipping software provided by FedEx, the US post office, and other shippers. At present, Order Manager is primarily a US-centered product, though changing the Windows "country" designation should affect the currency system used in the underlying Microsoft Access program.

In my opinion, ShopSite users who are doing any business to speak of should snap up Stone Edge Order Manager without hesitation, unless they have already developed in-house programs to provide these functions. If you are not a ShopSite user, you'll be salivating over Order Manager and hoping for the day that Order Manager is able to import data from your online store. The price is right, and the functionality for the typical ShopSite store application is very good.

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