Order Management Business Features

Orders

Orders placed by contacts (B2C/B2B contacts) to purchase physical goods and services offered by the business or its merchants/B2B Merchants within the Business Network.

An Order is fulfilled by either the business or one of the merchants/venues in order of the following methods:

• Delivery

• Pick Up

• Direct Sale

An Order follows a Queue that defines its

• The sequence of stages that the order goes through until its completion

• The Point of no return (optional)

• Milestone invoicing in one or more stages (optional)

An Order is considered as completed when:

• All of the physical goods/services are delivered to the contact

• All activities planned for the Order are complete

• All ordered items are invoiced

Order fulfilment estimates

Indicates if and which organisation (merchant or venue) will fulfil a contact’s delivery/pick-up order before the contact reaches the checkout screen

Order estimates

Provides an estimation on if, when how the order will be fulfilled and by which merchant/venue, plus the order’s detailed amounts

• total cost (w/o discounts), net, tax, discounts (w/o tax)

• account credit

• wallet funds

Order estimates amounts can be used for issuing a quotation to the contact.

Milestone-based vs. Progress-based

An Order can be paid off using various models:

• An Order can be fully invoiced upfront, i.e. at the time it is placed or

• An Order can be invoiced in multiple Milestone Invoices. Milestone invoices and their % are defined per Queue stage or

• An Order can be invoiced in multiple Invoices based on its progress of delivering ordered items to contacts, i.e. issue an invoice on every delivery.

The Order’s final invoice is issued upon its completion. In the final invoice, the Milestone invoices are credited.

Placing the order

Contacts specify the order’s basic information, which is:

• Supply method

• Delivery address or pick-up point

• The ordered items and their quantities. In the case of ordering termed services, the service’s price terms are also specified.

• How do they intend to pay for the order?

• Whether funds from their CRM.COM Wallet will be used to fully or partially pay off the order

• When the contact wants the order to be fulfilled which can even be on a different day (scheduling orders)

Order estimation Web APIs are utilised throughout the ordering flow

• Show which and if a merchant/venue will fulfil the order

• Present the order’s quotation, i.e. full details on how much the order costs

• Ad hoc discounts can also be specified on the order’s total cost.

Placing the Order is based on a key attribute; the estimation_id, which encapsulates the order’s details (valid for 2 hours)

Another important input is the order’s payments:

• up to two payments, one using a contact’s payment method or an offline payment method such as Cash. The second payment is using the CRM.COM Wallet

• payments are determined based on account credit and available wallet funds to spend

Subscription Orders

Contact willing to subscribe to new services follow the standard ordering flow in order to view a list of services that they can subscribe to as well as their price terms.

Order estimation, in this case, additionally includes

• service delivery estimation (if the service can be ordered) and billing estimation (when is the next billing day, how much the subscriber should pay and when this payment is due)

On placing the Order, all ordered services are added to the contract, subscriptions are created/existing ones are amended with the new services. As a result, the Order is also automatically completed since the services are delivered to the contact. In addition, the Service Delivery process is the one responsible for billing the subscriber for the ordered services.

B2B Marketplace Orders

Business aggregates products from its B2B Merchants and allows its contacts to place orders through the business’s marketplace. Contacts can place orders and include products from one or more B2B Merchants. Multiple orders are created, one for each B2B Merchant that is responsible for fulfilling the order.

Milestones

• Contacts have the ability to pay off the Order in multiple payments during the Order’s life cycle.

• Within the queue, a sub-set of stages includes milestone settings, i.e. a percentage of an amount compared to the queue’s total cost that should be invoiced and paid when the order reaches that stage.

• Milestones per Queue are defined either at the time of ordering or during its progression (percentage or amount)

• Ad hoc milestones are used to record payments received for an Order on an ad hoc basis during its progression.

• On reaching the milestone, an Invoice is posted having the milestone’s amount. This charge is credited in the final invoice.

Point of no Return

The point in time (during an Order’s processing) up until which contact can cancel the order.

• Prior to the PoNR, contacts can cancel their order and return the items delivered to them with no charges.

• On reaching the PoNR and onward, any items delivered to the contact cannot be returned back. Contacts will have to pay for them.

An Order’s PoNR is defined in one of the Queue’s stages.

When can a contract change or cancel the order

An order can be changed or cancelled at any point in time, but some restrictions are applied.

• Milestones: Milestones can be added or removed, but only if they are not reached yet. The milestone invoices' amounts cannot exceed an order’s total cost.

• Ordered items and their quantities: Ordered items can be modified (add/remove or even change their quantities) but

  • Dispatched items cannot be returned after reaching the PoNR

  • Dispatched items (and their quantities) must be aligned with the ordered items (and their amounts). For example, if X number of items were dispatched, then the ordered items' quantity cannot be reduced to a value less than X.

Automations

Complete list of automation that enables

• CRM.COM Communications

  • Communicate Contacts: notify the contacts of their order’s progression

  • Communicate Users: notify users responsible for managing a contact’s order

• CRM.COM Orders Provisioning

• Twinsoft & Aloha Provisioning of Orders

• Activity Scheduling

• Approval Requests (users and/or contacts)

• CRM.COM Webhooks

Approvals

Set-up approvals enable the business to progress an order only after the contact and/or a user approves the progression. Approvals available through Automations.

Event-based Charges

Set-up event-based charges to be applied on placing an Order. More specifically, apply either a standard fee (i.e. an expense whose price is retrieved from the Product Catalogue) or apply an expense whose final price depends on the distance between the venue (the organisation that fulfills the order) and the contact’s delivery address.

Order Catalogues

Ability to group/categorise items in the product catalogue with the purpose of easily presenting them to contacts based on:

• the time of ordering

• the supply method

• the organisation fulfilling the order

Analytics

Advanced business intelligence through:

• Dashboards

  • Home

  • Commerce Overview

• Reports

  • Contacts Orders Analysis - A list of orders placed by Contacts with an analysis of each Contact’s ordering preferences, including average order amount, preferred organisation, products ordered.

  • Order Details - View a list of completed Orders with order totals, and wallet funding information (if applicable).

  • Orders Summary - View order basic information, their queues, stages and any fulfilment details.

• Insights: Ability to perform Insights on completed Orders

Custom Fields

Extend an Order’s information based on Custom Fields defined by the business

Custom Forms

Configure your own custom data screen for Orders.

This is an external implementation designed using CRM.COM’s Back-Office APIs and hosted outside of CRM.COM, which can be loaded and used via the back-end system.