Entering phone orders

Hi Nigel,
There are actually a couple of different issues here:

• Items are reloaded into the cart: this is because the "Restore Shopping Cart" feature is ON and ProductCart believes that you are a customer returning to the store (since the same browser is being used). This brings up a good point: the Restore Shopping Cart feature should be disabled automatically when you are loading the storefront via the "Place Order" feature from the Control Panel. We'll work on this before the next version is out.


• Customer is logged out when clearing a restored cart: this is an open issue that has not been fixed yet. It is on our "To Do" list. It happens very rarely as in 99% of the cases a customer that sees that message is not currently logged in (it's a customer that is returning to the store, with a new browser session, therefore not logged in). For now, do not use the "Clear Cart" button, but rather view the cart and remove items directly from it.

NOTE: the Restore Shopping Cart feature DOES NOT restore the customer session. The customer session is started because you are using the "Place Order" feature from the Control Panel. Hope this makes sense.

Edited by earlyimp - 17-March-2011 at 2:02pm

My issue still exists and has nothing to do with the restore cart issues although I have had reports of customers being logged out of the system while shopping.  How can I clear the sessions in between customer call in orders?  Do I have to close the browser completely before starting a new order through the control panel?

We are constantly taking phone orders, 99% of which are from new customers. The only issue we ever run into is taking two consecutive orders. When you complete an order and immediately start on another (probably even not immediately), the shipping and billing info is entered from the previous order, whether or not a customer account was created. The easiest way to clear this seems to be to to the customer account home area and pressing logout, or even just going there. It appears to clear the sessions.

The only thing I would like to see is an easier way to generate and send quotes, for example for customers who have not yet created an account.

It would also be nice if it was easier to give custom discounts. Currently we have one guy who is constantly creating custom coupons and as a result our discount area is flooded with all of these one-time-use custom coupons for random amounts off.

Brett wrote: [...] the shipping and billing info is entered from the previous order, whether or not a customer account was created.

This is concerning. What version are you using?