Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
Hi, I'm JT and these are my thoughts on community, content management, Plain Black, and WebGUI.
If you run a brick and mortar shop, or you run cash registers at a trade show, concert, or other on-site event, you'll be glad to know that WebGUI 7.6 has two new features to help you out.
First, there is now a group attached to the shop called "Cashiers". You can use any group you want, but it defaults to Admins. These users have an extra field in the cart. They're able to type in the email address of a user, and then when they check out, the sale is registered to that user, rather than the cashier. The cashier is also noted in the transaction history so you can tally how many sales were made by a cashier if you want. Eventually we may add some reports for that too. If the user is not already in the system, an account will be automatically created for them. And any privileges that result from the transaction will automatically be assigned to the user's account rather than the cashier's account.
Second, there is now a default address in each user's address book. This will be useful to repeat customers that visit your site, but it's more useful to cashiers. Cashiers can set the address to the store that they are working at, and then when it comes time to check out, their address is automatically populated for shipping/tax calculation purposes. This address is also self populated for cash transactions so that no addresses need to be filled out in the case of a cash transaction. Then the only address that ever has to be filled out is in the case of a credit card transaction.
These two new features should make it much easier to run a local shop using your WebGUI site.
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User:
knowmad
Date: 11/25/2008 9:58 am |
Rating: 0
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Status: Archived |
JT,
Will the POS system support anonymous checkouts? What if I want to sell something to a person who doesn't have an account in the web site? Will I have to add them before selling or can I run the sale under the cashier account?
Also, I presume that the new field is optional so that if I do have someone with an account, I'll be able to attach the purchase to that user; but, if I want to buy something for myself I'll be able to do that.
Thanks,
William
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Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com
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User:
JT
Date: 11/25/2008 10:32 am |
Rating: -5
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Status: Archived |
I don't know what you mean by anonymous check outs.
If you type in an email address for a user that doesn't have an account on the system, an account will be automatically generated for them in real time.
You need not create an account before you start processing the sale. You can do it right at the cart by just typing in their email address.
You can run the sale under the cashier's account by simply not typing an email address into the "Order For" field in the cart.
Yes, if you want to make a purchase for yourself as a cashier, you just place the order without typing in another user's email address.
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User:
knowmad
Date: 11/25/2008 10:58 am |
Rating: 6
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Status: Archived |
Hey JT,
Thanks for the answers. In my book, anonymous checkout is the ability to buy something from an ecommerce web site without having an account. I see now how you've added POS to the existing WebGUI shopping cart functionality without needing to add anonymous checkout.
In some cases, anonymous checkout is implemented by simply hiding the fact that an account is being created behind the scenes. Depending on how much info is required when a new account is added and how that process is implemented can determine whether we can say anonymous checkouts are supported under WebGUI.
William
----
Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com
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User:
JT
Date: 11/26/2008 12:34 pm |
Rating: -24
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Status: Archived |
Feel free to put up an RFE for the anonymous checkout by dynamically creating a dummy account for the user if that's something you're interested in. I'm not a fan of it simply because then the user has no way to come back and check on orders, or cancel recurring orders, etc. But I probably would allow it to go into the core, because I'm sure people would want it despite it's disadvantages.
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User:
pvanthony
Date: 11/26/2008 11:39 pm |
Rating: 4
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Status: Archived |
Really cool stuff.
Thank you for building this in.
We use SQL-Ledger for accouting. It would be great if WebGUI Shop can be some how linked to SQL-Ledger so that it will show up in the accounts.
It maybe difficult but I am hoping that since both are written in Perl, it might be a little simpler that other accounting systems.
Any thoughts on this.
P.V.Anthony
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User:
JT
Date: 11/27/2008 12:38 am |
Rating: -3
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Status: Archived |
Put in an RFE. We aren't likely to build any direct integration, even though we also use SQL Ledger. However, we could absolutely write some sort of generic transaction export that you can then import into SQL Ledger.
