Phone Orders

I am going to try asking this again in a clearer manner.


How do you processes a phone order for a customer.....that requires special pricing, discounts etc. ?



Thanks
Chris

Sadly, it seems that the majority of ecommerce software overlooks this issue. We so the same as whizzinpc and simply place the order through the storefront for the customer. However, I'd like to see some sort of place to indicate while placing the order that it is being entered by an administrator for a customer over the phone. I guess the challenge would be displaying this input only to administrators, so customers don't see it as well. I think the best solution would be one that uses session variables or cookies or something to indicate on the front-end that one is logged in as an administrator, which could then cause a few extra inputs to be displayed where the administrator can enter some information associating the order with the customer.

For example, we use Olark on our site and it displays a list of current visitors. When we take a phone order, we can usually view our Olark visitor list and figure out which visitor we're talking to on the phone. If we had a way to somehow associate that visitor with the order then maybe when browsing our Google Analytics dashboard later we could see more information about that order and customer, such as how they arrived on our site and which page they were on when they called us. It wouldn't be perfect, since there may still be customers who write our number down and call us a couple days after visiting, but incomplete information is still better than no information.

The other obvious solution is to simply not take phone orders, and to require customers to place the order themselves on the site. I've talked to a few site owners who did this to avoid issues with customers disputing the charge and saying they never actually read and accepted the terms and conditions since we took the order for them.

Hi everyone,

Yeah it would be nice to have something that is very easy to manipulate while creating on order on the phone. A scenario that happens a lot is I might be talking to a customer and they say well I need 40pcs of xyz and I might say well I have 48pcs left if you take them all I let you have them for .87 instead of $1.00
  The way I handle this now is going back edit the order,  manually figure out the new total, then tacking that on as one time discount, it's not very straight forward.

Thanks for listening
Chris