Beta Testers Wanted: Business 2 Business Documents & Business Quotes Modules

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Looking for Beta Testers!

 

Our company has paid for development of two new modules that we are considering releasing for sale as a Presta Shop Addon. We are looking for some individuals interested in beta testing the module. In exchange for your assistance with bug finding and feedback, you will receive the modules free of use for your company. If you are interested, please contact me at [email protected] with a subject line titled “Beta Tester” and provide a brief description of your business and why you think the modules would be beneficial for your business.

 

Purpose of the modules: The two modules include what we are calling the “Business 2 Business Documents” and our “Business Quotation” modules.

 

Business 2 Business Documents: This module is designed to ease in the transfer of vital business documents between customers and manufacturers. The ideal company that might use this module is a company that drop ships straight from their manufacturer. This module will add a couple of new features to the “Order page”.

 

1 - E-mail Sales Invoice: under the documents section a new e-mail button will be added that will allow for easy e-mailing of the sales invoice to the customer. No more downloading and opening an e-mail client to e-mail the sales invoice. The module will use the contact e-mail provided by the customer.

 

2 – Generate Purchase Order: underneath the purchase order box, a new box will appear titled “Whole Sale Purchase Order” with a “Generate Invoice” button. Clicking on this button will generate a purchase order that is used to notify your manufacturer of a new order and to request production of the order. When the document is generated, you can preview the document for accuracy and if satisfied, click on the e-mail button to have the purchase order sent directly to the manufacturer of the product. Note! In the current iteration of this module it can only send to the manufacturer listed for the product, it does not yet have the capability to send to a supplier. The contact information for the manufacturer including shipping address and e-mail address must be completely filled out in order for this functionality to work correctly. Also of importance is the manufacturer must be specified for a product otherwise it will generate an error message.

 

3 – Generate Ship Authorization: this box will appear underneath the purchase order box. It will function in the same manner as the purchase order box with the exception that it will generate a ship authorization document that can be e-mailed to your manufacturer to authorize shipping of your merchandise. This feature is handy for businesses that many have a long lead time on manufacturing and need to verify that the order is still valid before shipping products to the customer. This module again uses the information specified under the manufacturers menu and the manufacturer for a product must be specified.

 

4 – Business 2 Business Documents: This module has its down default invoice, purchase order and ship authorization document templates. They are modeled after the Quick Books formatted documents.

 

The known limitations for this module include:

1. The module currently uses the manufacturer’s field for a product, not the supplier’s field. If you drop ship your product from multiple suppliers, this module will not work for you. If there is strong demand to be able to use suppliers in addition to manufacturers, we made add this functionality in future versions.
   
2. Documents are defaulted to appear similar to Quick Books generated documents. There is no way to specify your own templates for invoices, purchase orders and ship authorizations.
   

 

“Business Quotes” module. This module allows for quotes to be sent to customers or for customers to request quotes for your products. There are already a couple of quote modules available but this module is different in its purpose and functionality. The target business for this module is a business that does not display their product prices (probably running in catalog mode) on their website. The Business Quotation module will allow a new option to be set that will display a “Add to Cart for Price Quote” that will appear in place of the standard “Add to Cart” button on a product page. In this manner, a potential customer will be able to fill their shopping cart up with a list of products they are interested in receiving a quote for. When the customer has filled their cart with the products they want a quote for, they will begin the checkout process as if they were purchasing the product. However, in this case, the customer will only be asked to provide basic contact information and a delivery address for estimating shipping charges. The customer will then submit the shopping cart for a quote request.

 

Once the cart is submitted for a quote request, it will appear in the back office under “Orders -> Quotes” tab. Here, all quotes requested from customers will be displayed. The admin will be able to click on the new quote and it will be displayed very similar to an order with a few minor differences. The admin will be able to verify the quoted products, quantities and shipping charges as well as to make modifications to the order if necessary. Once the admin is satisfied that the quote details are in order, the admin will be able to click on a button that will send the quote to the customers e-mail address. The admin can specific how long a quote will be valid for and the module will track automatically if a quote has expired or is valid.

 

The customer will then receive an e-mail with the quote attached as a pdf document as well as a link in the e-mail that the customer can click on to take the customer back to the website and pull up their quote. The customer will then be able to review the quote and if satisfied, click on a button to turn the quote into an actual purchase. The customer will then be guided through the standard checkout process and this time be presented with a method for payment.

 

For businesses that provide quotes to customers over the phone, the admin is able to generate a quote on the backend as well and have it e-mailed to the potential customer. There are some limitations to this functionality that will hopefully be addressed in future versions of the module. The first being that in order to generate a quote from the back office “orders –> quotes” screen, if you have a multi-store setup, you must select the appropriate store you wish the quote to be from. When generating a quote from the back office, it is necessary to create a “guest” account for the potential customer. Essentially this means that you will be creating an account for the customer to include a password for the customer. Unless you intend to allow the customer to login to your website, we suggest using a strong default password known only to the admin and disabling the customer from being able to login when creating the account. (We hope to change how this functionality works in future versions of the module). Once the customer information has been entered, the admin can build a quote for the customer by selecting products from the store and adding them. When the admin is done building the quote, he can then specify the period of time the quote will be valid for and then have the quote sent to the customer as a pdf. The rest of the functionality from this point forward is the same as what was described above where the new quote will appear in the “orders -> quotes” menu and an e-mail with pdf and link will be sent to the customer.

 

There are a couple of known limitations to this module in its current form.

1. Single Page Checkout will not work, you must use the 5 page checkout method.
   
2. Quotes created from back office by admin will require a customer account to be created necessitating a password for the customer account.
   
3. Other stuff not thought of…
   
4. Documents are defaulted to appear similar to Quick Books generated documents. There is no way to specify your own templates for invoices, purchase orders and ship authorizations.
   

 

If you are interested in trying out these modules on your website, please send me an e-mail. Note that the modules are being used on our own companies website http://www.atlasamerican.com if you want to see how the functionality works from the front end. So far we have found the module to work for our setup but before we release the module for purchase, we want to broaden our sample size to ensure we have successfully squashed all of the bugs. We also expect to have many suggestions for feature requests. While we are open to additional feature requests, note that we have to pay a developer for all work and thus it is not a trivial matter or cost to add every feature requested. If the modules are well received and successful, we will then be able to add more features. Right now though, the focus is on core functionality and ensuring that they work as intended.

 

Again, if you are interested in participating in this beta test, please send an e-mail to [email protected] with a subject line titled “Beta Tester”. Note that as a beta, we cannot ensure that there will not be problems with adding these modules to your website. We suggest doing a full site backup before installing the modules and we recommend only people that are willing and able to help work through whatever bugs may be found. In exchange for your testing and feedback, we will provide the modules to your company for free. Note that this is a limited beta test, we are only seeking a few people to participate at this time.

Edited April 25, 2013 by [email protected] (see edit history)

[[email protected]]

We are still looking for beta testers for these two modules. If you are interested please use the included contact information found in my initial posting.