From NewHaven Software Wiki

Revision as of 23:36, 22 October 2013

Overview

For companies with low daily volumes of web orders, they may choose to just hand enter them into CMS. However, chances are that you have enough orders coming via your websites to warrant at least some form of automation. Here we have listed several options available to improve the efficiency of managing your orders and other data with your sites.

File Importing

Usually the first step for a smaller business wanting to get away from hand entering orders is to import orders into CMS. CMS has options available for:

• importing orders and catalog requests in an XML format (contact us for details and specification)
• order files from Yahoo stores
• order files from the 1ShoppingCart system

In these cases the process is simply to download a file of your orders from your site and point CMS to that file to import those orders. Contact us for additional information on our XML specification.

Integration with your Website

Most companies using CMS have a significant volume of orders coming from their websites and will benefit from further automation and integration. With such integrations you'll bypass the file import method and can have CMS communicate directly with your site. These communications can include order and catalog request downloads, posting updated product information including pricing and stock availability, and uploading order status updates. We have developed a module for CMS called eCMS to address the requirements of these more robust eCommerce integrations. No files to download or sites to log into, just click of a button or configure CMS to run these automatically on a schedule.

You can purchase our eCMS module and use one of our stock Plug-ins to connect to either CommerceV3 or Magento or you can use our API (see below) to build a custom Plug-in that will work with the cart/site of your choosing.

High Volume

After your orders are imported into CMS, they still need to be reviewed and released from the Verify Imports section of CMS before becoming a real order. This Verify Imports screen was designed to quickly let you review and save an order but, if you have hundreds or thousands of orders to do in a day, as many of our clients do, you may need more automation here too. This automation comes in the form of our Automated Imports module which lets you define a set of rules to establish which orders should be allowed to automatically converted to real orders and which should be reviewed by a member of your staff. More about this module can be found in our wiki article - Automated Imports Module.

eCommerce API

This API is a published specification, really a programmer's guide, of how to design a Plug-in (.dll) to handle eCommerce communications with CMS. This Plug-in sits between CMS and your site and manages not only URLs to connect to and logins but also translation of data to ensure both CMS and your cart are getting what they need and in the right format.

Please contact your Account Manager if you are interested in receiving a copy of the API. From there you can assess whether the development of the Plug-in is something you would like to pursue in-house, with your own contractor, or contract with us. Please keep in the mind, our API specification was designed for a programmer, not a web developer.

Supported Plug-In's

CommerceV3 (CV3)

This was the first plug-in built for CMS and we have a long standing relationship with CV3. This CommerceV3 Plug-in allows CMS to communicate with your store on order downloads, product/inventory uploads, and order status uploads.

Magento (beta)

We have written a CMS Plug-in for Magento that works with our eCMS module. This Magento Plug-in allows CMS to communicate with your Magento store for order downloads, product/inventory uploads, and order status uploads. (Catalog requests do require that a third party extension be added to Magento.)

Magento is an open source solution available in different editions to suit your needs and budget. You can host it on your own web server and use the free Community edition or use the inexpensive hosted Go edition. Which ever edition you choose, the CMS Magento Plug-in will handle the communications with your Magento site. This Plug-in will also work with Magento's hosted Enterprise version (NewHaven Software is a Bronze Magento partner).

Generic File Based

If your eCommerce solution does not provide a web service that CMS can connect to, you may still have automation options available to you. With our generic file based plug-in, CMS can connect to FTP to download a file of your orders and import them if they are in our XML format. If they are not in our XML format, a custom transform can be written to convert their file format into ours and it will work in conjunction with the plug-in so the import is a one step process (and can be scheduled). Likewise, the same can be done for posting order status updates back to FTP, for example.

Custom

If you wish to have your site connect to our API (Plug-in not listed above) you may pursue develop a Plug-in in-house, with your own contractor, or contract with us. Please contact your Account Manager for more details.