eCommerce Order Processing System

• Website Development

Manual, time-consuming approval process

We built a website application to manage a clients website orders that directly links into their eCommerce system. This system saves their staff/business hundreds of hours per week. Below you can see how it works and how we planned and built it.

A company needed to find a solution to help streamline their order process after a sale had been made. They sell customised products and came to us asking if we could help find a solution to streamline their current order process. Because the products they offer have a lot of customisation options, they needed to provide mockups for their customers to review before finalising the order and sending it out, the process was like this:

• Customised order comes through the website.
• A mockup is produced and emailed to the customer.
• Wait for the customer to come back, with amendments or approval.
• Once the customer has approved it, the order is sent off to the manufacturers.
• When the order has been made, it is dispatched straight to the customer.

This process is done for hundreds of orders each week, as you can imagine, this took a lot of time, then add in the fact that they have multiple sources where they receive orders from, including Magento websites, Ebay and Amazon. Then split the process over different team members dealing with the orders, depending on who is available. All of these elements add to the chance for human error when creating these orders, either from customers or staff.

This drastically increases the amount of time it takes to get an order complete and they needed a more efficient way to manage all their orders and easily obtain feedback for bespoke orders before being manufactured and shipped.

Planning a solution

We met with the client to run through their existing process and talk about building a system that would help automate this process. We discussed the key features required and the timeline to put together a spec sheet of what the automated system (an eCommerce order processing system) would need to do.

From this, we started to create a structure, looking at what tools we would need to build an eCommerce order processing system, what parts would be complex or need a workaround. We decided that an eCommerce order processing systems would be built-in Laravel and CSS, using Linux libraries to accomplish some of the functionality.

We put together some wireframes and concepts of how the new eCommerce order processing system would work for the customer and confirmed how long it would take to build.

Simplifying the bespoke order process

Prioritising the more urgent orders

Some orders that came through need to be automatically flagged as a priority, such as orders with express delivery or because certain items are more time sensitive.

So we built an eCommerce order processing system to be able to detect a time sensitive order or if express delivery was part of an order, marking those orders as higher priority. The staff can then better organise what they work on by filtering these orders and ensure those are worked on first.

Upgrading and beyond