Order Processing

The First Order Has Arrived! What to Do..

These instructions describe how to process a new order that just arrived in your 21.COMMERCE system and also show various possibilities and fulfillment procedures. It is your decision as a shop administrator what processes fit best to your company and your products. The instructions in this manual should be considered as recommendations.

One of the great benefits of using 21.COMMERCE is the integration of 21.AbaNinja. If you receive an order, it will automatically be transferred to 21.AbaNinja according to your AbaNinja module settings (as draft or as an invoice). You can do the fulfillment using AbaNinja or 21.COMMERCE. In this document, we show you how you can do the fulfillment in 21.COMMERCE.

Receiving an Order

All begins when a customer places a new order in your webshop. 21.COMMERCE now sends an order confirmation email to the customer as well as to you as the shop administrator. This email contains all data relevant to be able to process this order: Customer invoice address, delivery address, order identification data and the shopping cart in the appropriate currency and language. The email to the shop operator is even more detailed, including a direct link to the order in the customer management of your 21.COMMERCE system. Also regulative requirements are met. Please decide for yourself if you already want do declare an acceptance of the order, i.e. the conclusion of the contract, with the order confirmation.

Email is a technology that does not guarantee, that it will arrive at the destination. This can have various reasons (false spam detection, routing problems, SMTP problems, quota problems, …). 21.COMMERCE as the mail sending instance cannot do anything about these type of transmission problems. It is therefore a good idea to periodically check the customer management in the shop administration of your 21.COMMERCE system to see whether newly received orders have arrived - e.g. once a day or at a different interval depending on the number of orders in your own shop. If you open the customer management (shop administration → customers/orders → customer management), the latest orders are displayed on top.

Figure 1: Customer management

Order Status: “received” / Customer Management

The start page of the customer management shows you a list of orders, sorted by date. All newly received orders have the order status received. As soon as you intend to fulfill the order / put the ordered goods in the package ready for shipment, select the order status in progress. Customers see the new order status in their customer accounts (“received” changes to “in progress”).

The order can now also be found in your AbaNinja (as a draft or invoice).

Order Status: “in progress”

Check the payment method at this point:

• Cash payment (goods are picked up at store): Make sure that the goods are available in the respective store.
• Cash before delivery: Don’t “do anything” until you are sure the correct amount has been credited to the appropriate account. In most cases, the invoice number or the order reference number is given as identification. If a customer has not paid yet after one week, he/she should be contacted. After two to three weeks at the latest, you should delete the order and inform the customer by email, to avoid unnecessary goods reservations and uncompleted orders. By the way, here you benefit from the direct AbaNinja connection with a direct bank connection (currently Raiffeisen Banks and St. Galler Kantonalbank, soon a lot more financial institutions will follow). In this case, before you release the order, you only have to check in AbaNinja whether the payment has been marked as paid.
• Online payment methods (credit cards, TWINT): Generally, it should be possible to continue here without any problems. With credit cards you are on the safe side with a 3D-Secure contract with liability shift for the merchant and with debit procedures you are safe anyway.

If the payment method allows it, you can prepare the package for shipping. If physical products have been purchased, put them in the package and reorder goods that are not in stock.

When you have all your products ready for shipping, you can print a delivery note. This is most convenient with the pre-installed, free and in your case already activated 21.COMMERCE module PDF-Print, which can print a delivery note directly with one click, and which links in the administration directly to the corresponding AbaNinja invoice (if it already exists there). You can even print many delivery notes with one operation.

You can, for example, place the printed delivery note comfortably in a transparent document pocket and are thus very fast in preparing your parcels.

Order Status: “shipped”

You can now ship the package.

Now we can inform the customer that his order has been shipped and his delivery is on its way.

This can be done in two different ways in the customer management of the shop administration:

1. Click on the button Send for each order you sent. For security reasons, the shop asks again whether you really want to send an information email to the customer. Confirm with OK if you are sure, you haven’t forgotten anything.
2. Change the order status for each of the shipped orders to shipped in the drop-down menu.

Now the order status is automatically changed to shipped and the customer is informed by email that his order has been shipped. If the parcel tracking module is used and a tracking number has been entered for the order, this will be sent in the email.

Figure 2: Change order status

Order Status: “completed”

The goods have been shipped and therefore the order processing is almost completed.

When the order status changes to completed, the order is marked as “completed” accordingly.

We recommend that the order status is not set to “completed” until the money has actually been credited to your account (with cash before delivery and cash payments there is no need to check again). Be especially careful with online payment methods and really make sure you check the payment status before you change the order status to “completed”. Credit card funds are sometimes transferred much later in a collective payment. Based on our experience, we can report that even large financial institutions have had very seldom issues, like transactions that have not been transferred.

With 21.AbaNinja, your order data will automatically be transferred to your bookkeeping software (either within 21.AbaNinja or Abacus).

If you send goods and accept payment by invoice, we would like to give some more information here:

• Do not just send goods to every customer by invoice. Depending on the customer segment and branch, the risk of large payment defaults can be very high. Your own experience will certainly help in making this decision. To all new shop operators who just started, we recommend to deactivate this payment method with selective activation per customer account. Info: The PepperShop full version will allow you to integrate credit decision systems to do this for you automatically.

Figure 3: Order status “completed” / after receiving the payment and sending the package

With certain type of products you have to expect more ore less returns. Think about the handling of returns at an early stage and support the customer with appropriately prepared return slips.