Drupal e-Commerce

An overview of the daily operations of an ecommerce store and its interface, once things are configured to your satisfaction. This page is intended to be useful to a client/site-administrator/shipping-clerk.

Notifications

When Transaction notices are enabled in [Administer » E-Commerce configuration » Store], The store administrator receives an email summary of the most recent transactions.
This is triggered by cron, so you must have cron working on your site. It runs only as often as cron runs, not immediately the purchase is made! So for testing, you may have to trigger cron.php to see the emails.

This means the store admin (or whoevers job it is to fill out the orders) gets one email summary potentially containing many orders. This is probably quite practical. The customer however receives their order confirmation immediately.
If you want to update the frequency of these alerts, configure your cronjob.

If transaction notices are NOT enabled, you'll have to regularly visit the e-Commerce status page to see outstanding 'Orders needing action'.

Transaction lifecycle

Orders needing action lists the orders whose payment has been made, but are not flagged as completed in the workflow.
The UI widget in the workflow column allows you to step the transaction through the remaining steps, namely:

• When it enters the workflow, you (the storeman or expiditer) have received the request.
• Your first step should be to print invoice or packing slip. Doing so should provide you with the details you need to take to the store-room, pack the items and get them to your shiping company.
  Just viewing that page is enough for the system to assume you've done so, and shift the workflow into invoiced. You can still revisit the printable invoice at any time.
• When you have shipped the order (come back from the post office) you will then choose shipping notify to tell the system (and the customer) that this has been done. This may take you to a screen where you can review and send an email to the customer to inform them of the fact. It will also forward the workflow status into shipped.
• That should be the end of it, but the order is not technically completed until the next cron run. Shipped orders still appear in your list of Orders needing action until cron runs again, and shifts them automatically for you.
  I guess that is so you can still see a summary of what you've done today, but it sure looked like a button was missing there ;-)
• completed orders can be found in your 'Completed' queue or by listing [Administer » E-Commerce » Transactions] or searching the transactions.
  An admin should also be able to review a users order history via their profile, with an URL like store/history/{uid} but that doesn't seem available yet.

Depending on many settings, and your preferred way of doing things, some of this process may be different for you, but this is a basic short path through the expected steps. You can choose to do some steps in a different order, or edit the workflow status directly by choosing to edit the transaction. Doing so may skip some actions like the email notifications, so take care.

Ideally, you should clear out all Orders needing action each day - or at least shift them into "shipped" state.

These notes made for E-Commerce package 5--3. Details may change over time.