Order Processing & Fulfillment

[jmandala]

I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this question, but here goes!

In our installation, we will want to transmit a data feed for pick/pack lists to the warehouse. In addition we will want to receive shipping notification for orders from the warehouse, and bill the credit cards based on what has shipped.

I haven't seen (probably overlooked!) any information on KK's docs relating to how orders are fulfilled after they have been entered. I would like help answering the following questions:

1. What process & workflow do folks use to fulfill orders?

2. At what point do people charge CC's?

3. Is there a best practice or doc that discusses this anywhere?

Thanks so much!

Joshua

[julie]

1. What process & workflow do folks use to fulfill orders?

All customers tend to have different requirements and many integrate with existing fulfillment systems. KonaKart allows you to:

• Define your own order states


• Change the state of an order either through the admin app or API


• Our next version will have a built in scheduler to allow you to schedule batch jobs such as informing customers that a product is now in stock or that an order hasn't been paid for etc.

2. At what point do people charge CC's?

I think that this depends mainly on legal restrictions. In Europe, many countries allow you to charge CC's as soon as the order has been placed. In some countries / states you can only charge when the products have been shipped. 

3. Is there a best practice or doc that discusses this anywhere?

Not that I know of; the reason being that it is very specific to your business.

[jmandala]

Thanks for your reply.

So is it accurate to understand that implementers are writing custom code to get the orders out of KK?

Is is safe to assume that the web services have straightforward methods for retrieving, for example, all orders that are submitted but not yet shipped?

Does BIRT often play a role in this?

Thanks!

[greg]

So is it accurate to understand that implementers are writing custom code to get the orders out of KK?

Yes this would be typical...  either by pushing out order data or pulling from outside.

Is is safe to assume that the web services have straightforward methods for retrieving, for example, all orders that are submitted but not yet shipped?

Yes this kind of thing is easy enough to achieve.

Rather than using SOAP stubs that you might have generated from WSDL we provide SOAP versions of the engines...   The great advantage of this is that the calls you make using these versions of the engine are identical to those made with the direct POJO engines.  (Both versions of the engines, SOAP and POJO versions, implement the engine interfaces, so in your code you can decide which one to use (at runtime if you want) and the rest of the code is the same).   An advantage of doing this in the SOAP case is that the engine takes care of all the web service details under the hood...

If required you can always generate your SOAP stubs from our WSDL - which is something you would probably want to do if your client technology was not java.

To figure out what you can do with the APIS you can look at our javadoc... which is the same for both the direct POJO engines and the SOAP engines.

Does BIRT often play a role in this?

Not really... although it could.  BIRT is a reporting tool that we have loosely-integrated.  You can write reports using BIRT to extract data in almost limitless forms...  Sometimes BIRT reports will be a good way to solve your requirements, other times little java programs will be more appropriate..  depends on the requirement...

[jmandala]

This is helpful clarification. Thank you!