Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Plug into Better Shipping Part 10: Getting Orders Out The Door




In previous blogs we’ve spoken about optimising your rules and preferences for delivery. Now that the back end has been customised, it’s time to go through what happens when customers order from you and what you need to know to get those products out the door and into your customers’ hands.

A consistent approach to fulfilment and implementing a streamlined process will ensure that you’re meeting your customers’ expectations the majority of the time. By maintaining a quick turnaround time for order fulfilment, you can ensure that you are meeting delivery deadlines and giving your customers a positive buying experience. The average delivery time for online orders in Australia is 2.8 days and understanding how to process your orders in the back end of Magento is key to ensuring you can match or better that.

Benefits:

  • Temando allows you to Book shipments, print consignment details and push tracking details to the customer
  • Full access to change order details and select different quotes
  • As there is no manual entry required to fulfil your orders, the chance of human error is minimised
  • The ability to batch process multiple orders at once


How to Process Single Bookings:
Once you’ve logged into your Magento Dashboard, navigate to the Temando tab and select ‘Manage Shipments:




Next you’ll see a list of orders that have been placed. To ship an order, simply click ‘view’ on the relevant row:



Now you’ll be presented with the order details of that specific order. Here, you are able to make any changes to the order that may be required. At the bottom of the page, the quotes generated for the order will be visible, with the fastest and cheapest options indicated in the ‘notes’ column:



Click ‘Make Booking’ next to the quote that best suits your requirements to confirm the booking. Now at the top of the page you will see confirmation that the shipment has been booked:



The orange button at the top of the order details will now read ‘View Consignment’ which you can click to download the consignment note and shipment label to print and attach to the package.


How to Process Multiple Orders:
If you are on a Temando Magento Extension Business plan you have the added ability to process multiple orders at once. In order to do so, follow the same process as above to navigate to the Manage Shipments page. When you’ve reached the page, you will be able to select your pending orders and using the dropdown menu on the right hand side of the screen, select ‘Book Shipments’:



Once you have booked the relevant orders, click ‘Retrieve Consignment Label’ to download a pdf document with the labels for all selected orders.
Now all you need to do is pack and label your packages and await pickup.


Temando in Magento also offers a range of fulfilment options for business that have larger order volumes or more specific fulfilment needs such as:

  • Alternate routing options by fulfiling from multiple warehouses
  • Manifesting for businesses that have permanent pickups in place
  • The ability to fulfil your orders from ERP and warehouse management systems 

Minimising the time from when a customer places an order through to its fulfilment is vital to surprising and delighting your customers. By providing one place to book shipments, print labels and push tracking information to your customer, Temando lets you streamline your process and get your customer their product as soon as possible.


Next week’s blog will be in a similar vein to this one, we’ll be having a look at the specifics of picking, packing and labelling your orders ready for collection. 

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Plug Into Better Shipping Part 9: Click & Collect Configuration




Continuing on from our last post, Click & Collect which walked through the Click & Collect experience for the user, this week we show you how to configure and manage your Magento admin to offer Click & Collect on the front end. There are 3 parts to this post:

1. How to configure the basics

2. How to set up locations and zones

3. Store user experience


How do you configure the basics of Click & Collect in your Magento admin? 

1. Select Click & Collect settings from the Temando Click & Collect tab in the top nav

Select Click & Collect Settings

2. In the general information tab you will need to configure the following:
Sections to configure in the Click & Collect module

Rate Configuration: If you would like to add a price to the Click & Collect option. This value will be displayed to the customer. 
Options: Enabling 'Show Estimate Shipping on Product Page' will include Click & Collect as a delivery option among the other options you have enabled.
Store Map: Enable the store map to appear for customer selection. You can edit details such as the size, icon and name in this section.

Example of store map that is displayed to the customer when Store Map is enabled


Checkout Calender: Allows customers to select a day they would like to collect the item.
Email Template:  Customise emails to be sent to customers. We recommend the following:
  • Ready for Pickup Template used to send “Awaiting Collection” email to customers. 
  • Reminder Template used to send reminders to customers about available pickup
  • Admin Template used to send an email to the store notifying them that they have an order to be fulfilled and collected by a customer. 
Send admin email on invoice creation: The order to collect email will be sent to the store when the invoice is created. 

*You can upload the email templates in the system section of your admin, learn more. 

How do you set up locations?
Sections to configure when setting up locations

1. Select Manage Stores from the Temando Click & Collect tab in the top nav
2. Select Add New Store
3. Enter general information

Display location hours: Enable this if you would like store hours to be visible to your customers. Setting the store hours comes later in the configuration
Location note: Allows a message about the store location to be displayed to the customer.

4. Enter the new stores address and contact details
5. Zones: select the zones this store services. You can select multiple zones by using CTRL and clicking
6. Location hours: select ‘add hours’ to add a day (under name) and start and end times. Ensure you select ‘save' when your done
7. User Permissions: select which users you would like to access this locations orders. Do this by checking the radio button and clicking ‘save’

How do you set up Zones?
Zones are postcodes within a country that are supported by a Click & Collect option. Each Store needs to have at least one Zone assigned to it. 

The zone/s assigned to a store dictates the map zoom on the front-end. E.g. If postcode range 2000:2999 is supported by a store the map will zoom out to view the image of New South Wales.
We talked in depth about setting up locations and zones in our previous post here.

You need to use the same configuration method as discussed in our part 8 blog post. But this time the zones need to be created in the Click & Collect section of the Magento Admin. 

What does it look like for the store? 

1. If enabled – the store will get an email notifying that an item has been purchased from their store
2. Log into Magento admin and head to the ‘manage collections’ under Temando Click & Collect tab
3. Any pending collections will be listed with a pending status, click on the order to view the details of the order and to access the pick slip.

List of pending and collected orders

4. When the items are ready for the customer to collect select ‘ready to collect’ this will prompt a notification email
5. Need to send a reminder to the customer to collect their parcel? Go back into the order and click send email reminder
6. Once the customer has collected their parcel make sure you enter the order number and confirm collection in the backend to keep records up to date. This will change the pickup state to order collected and the process is complete.

Click & Collect is an easy and effective delivery option that your customers will appreciate being offered. 

If you would like to offer Click & Collect in your Magento store contact our team. 



Friday, June 13, 2014

Plug Into Better Shipping Part 8: Click & Collect



The digital and physical worlds have collided. Consumers expect a consistent experience across multiple touch points. Friction, real or perceived, must be removed to increase conversions and provide a customer experience with a point of difference.



Many bricks and mortar retailers are including physical store fulfilment models, this is evident in the Australian retail landscape, simply type in 'Click and Collect' into your search engine and pages will appear of retailers who have adopted this fulfilment model.

For many SME merchants this seemingly enterprise grade functionality is only available for the top end of town. Think again. Click & Collect can easily be enabled when 2 store locations are available in your Magento platform. 



BCF offer Pickup in Store



DS Click & Collect promotional page



Benefits
- No delivery costs for your business. The ability to charge what ever amount to your customer.
- Incremental conversion attribution. 
- Increased in-store foot traffic and opportunities for customer engagement.
- Multiple store capability allows the customer to select the pick-up store most convenient to them. 

What does the customer journey look like?



Points to consider 
1. Staffing – who will manage Click & Collect in-store? Nominate an eCommerce champion to look after the process flow
2. Dedicate a computer and work station for Click & Collect orders
3. If your store is smaller, notifications can be sent by email advising in-store staff that Click & Collect has been selected as a delivery option. This allows you to prioritise fulfilment ASAP.

Remember, you can easily offer these options, but you need to make sure you have the processes and technology in place to provide a seamless customer experience. Ensure you have the Click & Collect journey down pat (dry run through recommended) – so when your customer gets to your store they've had a 'surprise and delight' experience. Who knows, maybe they'll purchase that shirt they were collecting in black as well. 


Next week we will show you how to configure Click & Collect in your admin.

Want to learn more about any of the features we talk about? Contact one of our Solution Managers or visit www.temando.com.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Plug Into Better Shipping Part 7: Adding Value for the Social Conscious



Giving your customer options isn't just about delivery, you can also add value to your customers purchase through options such as carbon offset or micro donations. This has been an online norm for a few years now with booking platforms such as Jetstar and Virgin Australia giving customers the opportunity to carbon offset their flights as well as donating to suggested charity programs.
Jetstars checkout give the option to offset and donate.




When using the Temando Shipping Extension in Magento you have the ability to offer your customers the option to carbon offset or make a micro donations at the checkout. Providing these alternative options not only helps with your corporate responsibility positioning, it also allows the social conscious customer to contribute to positive social change. Whilst the options may not directly impact your conversions it's a welcome addition to your brand image and all offsets are measured.

In a recent public opinion poll conducted by the Lowy Institute 45% of Australian respondents now see global warming as a ‘serious and pressing problem’. Temando in co-operation with the Gaia Partnership can easily enable carbon offsets in your Magento store. The Gaia Partnership measures and offsets the carbon from the courier delivery through programs such as Tasmanian Native Forest Protection Project.





Anaconda is a great eCommerce example of a business dedicated to corporate responsibility. Anaconda have configured their Magento store to display carbon offset as optional at the checkout.

Anaconda have Carbon Offset enabled at the checkout.







How to enable carbon offset
1. In your Magento admin panel go to Temando > Configuration Settings > Temando
2. From the carbon offset section you have 3 options to select from:
        Disabled – this option will turn off the carbon offset and is unavailable to customers
        Optional – a check box is displayed to the customer and they can choose to opt in
        Mandatory – carbon offset is added to all orders
3. Once you have selected from the drop down menu click ‘save config’





Along with carbon offsetting, you can also enable micro donations to a charity. Through the Temando Shipping Extension for Magento you can offer a micro donation to the Footprints Network. The Footprints Network funds projects such as Keeping girls in school Uganda, Kids clean water project Mpofini village and other worthy projects.


How to enable Footprints
1. Once in your Magento admin panel go to Temando > Configuration Settings > Temando
2. From the Footprints section you have 3 options to select from:
        Disabled – this option will turn off the carbon offset and is unavailable to customers
        Optional – a check box is displayed to the customer and they can choose to opt in
        Mandatory – carbon offset is added to all orders
3. Once you have selected from the drop down menu click ‘save config’


If you have selected optional or mandatory it will appear in your checkout in the shipping section.


Enabling these options at the checkout is a great value add for your social conscious customer.