Ordering and shipping are essential processes in e-commerce. This page provides tips related to the purchasing process and order handling in the Apogee StoreFront and Asanti StoreFront web-to-print solutions. The tips and tricks were previously published in StoreFront newsletters. You can subscribe here to receive new tips and tricks as well as other StoreFront related news.

Easy reordering

Many customers use their storefront mainly to reorder products. You can make life easy for them by adding a direct link to their list of previously ordered products on the home page of the store. Below is an example of such a link. The icon with the arrows is linked to https://.apogeestorefront.com/web-to-print/accountProductList.ep (with of course being the name of the store). Clicking this link is similar to clicking the ‘Your account’ link and then navigating to the ‘Your Products’ page.

Registering a US shipping address

In the USA the TaxCloud service can be used to calculate sales tax. It relies on the official USPS address registry to determine if a shipping address actually exists. Newly built homes or offices may not yet be registered and that can lead to issues during checkout. The user needs to make sure the building is registered with the United States Post Office, as described on this page.

Customers who don’t convert

Kissmetrics is a blog about analytics, marketing and website testing. They published an interesting article about shopping cart abandonment, which explains why not every visitor of your store is actually a buyer.

Two reasons to avoid sending shipping confirmation e-mails

The order shipment confirmation window contains a checkbox labelled ‘Send E-mail’.

By default that checkbox is activated, which means the user will get an e-mail notification that the order is on its way. Here are some examples where deactivating that checkbox is useful:

• If a user has many pending orders that will all be shipped on the same day, you can avoid sending too many e-mails by only leaving this checkbox activated for one shipment. Add a comment for that shipment that tells the customer all the other orders are also on their way.
• If some orders were delivered without changing their status to ‘Shipped’ they will forever remain listed in the order overview. Now you can do a little spring cleaning by changing these order statuses without the risk of informing customers that packages which they already received months ago are now on their way.

Why don’t order statuses change?

When users purchase stock products or digital products, these order items are normally marked as ‘Shipped’ automatically in StoreCenter. If this does not happen, the first thing to check is whether your Apogee or Asanti workflow is still downloading order data. Even though digital and stock products don’t need to be processed by the workflow, StoreFront assumes that the workflow might be used to send order data to an MIS system. As long as the connection to the workflow is not working, StoreFront will continue marking the items as ‘Prepared’. Once the communication with Apogee or Asanti is restored (which may require a reboot of the workflow), the order item statuses will be updated