Customer Database Software - Need an Internet and Mail Order solution

[TelegramSam]

Hi,

One of our businesses takes orders online and via the telephone for physical products we sell.

As this gets bigger, the demands for better systems is increasing.

We want to develop or purchase some kind of customer database which helps us keep track of our customers and helps us generate things like shipping documents and invoices etc.

About 40% of our orders come in via the telephone and the rest via an email notification with encrypted payment information.

So as you can see there is a certain amount of manual work to keep track of it all. As well as there being the need to manually enter data into a database, I want to find a simple way to automate as much as possible.

One of the problems is that when customers repeat order, we have to manually track them on our system and then add their information into their already existing record.

We would love an all singing, all dancing Amazon type solution but we don't have a few million dollars to spend on it.

Also we would still have the issue of customers ringing us up and placing orders that way.

Is there any existing mail order software that is designed for the running of a mail order businesses that we could then tweak to include our internet sales etc.

Does anyone have any ideas?

The volume of transactions is a few hundred per week.

Thanks,

Sam

[theimdude]

Just a suggestion as I was going to do the same for a client of mine as they do telephone and internet orders. Why don't you use cube cart as admins can login anywhere and process orders online as well as people can order online. Basically sales staff can sign up a client with the item or direct them to the site.

With 500 sales a week I don't think you will have a problem even on a vps or shared server although I would get a VPS. Get one at Liquid Web for $50 a months as it is fully managed with cpanel.

Cubecart have a good backend with complete control over your clients. Cube cart is free. If you haven't got cpanel I can install cubecart for you on a subdomain on one of my domains for you to try.

edit - needed to mention it even ties up with UPS and US postal service and Royal Mail. You can also do invoices

theimdude

[BrianMcLeod]

You might look into Filemaker Pro

FileMaker

It's cross-platform, flexible and extremely powerful.

Best,

Brian

[moodyresources]

I used the Heavy Metal shopping cart (google it and it comes up as make-a-store) for one of my ecommerce websites and loved it. You can pick and choose which modules you really need so it is very scalable. We could print invoices with barcodes and scan the barcodes to print shipping labels. We could take orders over the phone through the backend.

Whatever you do, do your research BEFORE you sign up for anything. Even then, you should be working from a master list of all the features you need to have and would like to have in the future. Drill the software provider with all your questions. Demand specific answers, not just "Yes, we can do that." You will find that later, you can't really do it because they were just saying yes to get you to buy.

One other thing. Before you buy, call their technical support with some questions and see how helpful they are.

HTH,
Melissa Moody

[Gail Sober]

If you were able to move your website to Zen-Cart, there is a mod that can be used to login as your customer and take phone orders.

Admin login as customer, ecommerce shopping cart software by Zen Cart ecommerce solution

Zen-Cart does all the shipping documents and invoices etc

I've been using it for years.

[lklein]

We use KBilling for our phone orders. It has built in recurring orders. Its the only program we could find that worked right for us.

Billing Software & Invoicing Software for YOUR Business

I don't know if you can use it for your intenet orders though...

The programmer is pretty good about updating with users input.

Lambert

[TelegramSam]

Thanks everyone. Some useful ideas.

It seems that it is a necessary evil, keeping good track of things.

The payoff is that the database will help with our marketing efforts etc.

In one way or another, either money or man hours, it is quite an investment for a growing company.

I am quite surprised that there aren't more ready made solutions. My research will be ongoing for a while because I want to get the solution right for our business.

More ideas are welcome. Thanks.

[AndreVas]

I'm in same offline biz model as you. Already researched.

Get this: Contact Plus Professional

It even has a automated marketing campaigns. So you can assign each customer to a multi-step campaign (EG: Day 1: Send email, 5 Days later: print postcard: 10 Days later: send sales letter).

Then each day the software tells you who needs to get a letter, email, postcard, phone call. Then it auto processes all of them. Even has Skype integration for telemarketing.



Another reason, is you can create your own custom fields.

Its bloody unbelievable software I've recommended to all my business friends.