IMPACT SOLUTIONS: Split Orders Functionality for ECHO eCommerce

The greatest value E-dreamz brings as an organization isn’t our web design talent or even our custom development capabilities. It’s our staff’s senior level background in project management, process improvement, workflow management, systems integration and business operations.

When you combine that experience with our design and development capabilities, you get solutions that impact your business in meaningful, measurable ways. Through our Impact Solutions series, we dive into specific challenges our clients faced and the solutions the E-dreamz team developed to improve their processes and impact their businesses.

The most recent Impact Solution we developed for one of our clients was a custom Split Orders function added to our ECHO eCommerce platform.

The Challenge

By way of a routine check-in with one of our top performing eCommerce clients operating in the high-end furniture industry, we were surprised to discover a fulfillment workflow in serious need of some process improvement.

As is often the case with any eCommerce business, not all products for sale by our furniture client are immediately available for shipment. Some items are on hand in a warehouse; others have to be sourced from a supplier or are on backorder. In the case of customer orders where multiple items of varying availability were purchased together in a single order, our client was having their customer service personnel manually contact the customer, cancel the customer’s original order, and direct the customer to place new, separate orders for each of the items they wanted so that the on-hand items could ship immediately and the backorder items could be handled on a separate order when they become available.

E-dreamz’s Solutions Engineering team immediately jumped into this process to develop a better way to manage this workflow.

The Solution

After a quick discovery, planning and prototyping session, we went to work on building a custom Split Orders feature into the client’s ECHO administrative backend. The new Split feature is accessed via the standard order management menu in the ECHO backend for quick and easy access.

The new Split feature delivers the following functionality:

• A new menu that lists all items in the order, associated quantities of each item, and item details (SKU, Price, Name, etc)
• Quick-select interface for choosing which items and which quantities of each item need to be Split from the initial order.
• Confirmation prompts to ensure correct items are selected and Split from the order.
• Automatic creation of new order(s) with new order numbers retaining all original details from the customer’s initial order in terms of contact information, shipping, billing, etc.
• Automatic order notes added to both the initial order and the newly created order that detail that the split process and provide referencing order numbers for each new order created.
• Admin discretion for automatic email notification to customers alerting them of the Split process and the new order number(s).

The Impact

This new feature allows our client to manage a process in seconds that used to take incalculable time calling customers, talking them through the process, and guiding them to self-manage the issue.

The disruption to the customer experience is now completely removed from the old process, eliminating the need for the customer to take any action on their own.

The customer service process is greatly simplified and streamlined, allowing our client to process orders much more quickly and efficiently.

And the internal order tracking and order backlog reports are now cleaner and easier to move through existing fulfillment workflows.

If your business is currently operating with cumbersome manual processes that bog down your productivity or workflows, contact us to see if E-dreamz can develop a similar Impact Solution that optimizes your ability to manage, scale and grow your business online.