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You can’t have a successful business without having a steady and growing customer base. But in order to maintain your customer base and help it grow, you need to have in place a customer relationship management system to keep your customers informed and most importantly pleased. You can’t achieve top-notch customer satisfaction without having a team of prepared customer service representatives; so we’ve integrated a few tools that will help you deliver the best customer satisfaction out there.

The CHAT feature: have a quick question for another rep, fulfillment provider or a supervisor while you’re on a call with a customer? With the chat feature you can communicate directly with another Orderwave user without interrupting your call.

Create easy-to-follow CONTACT SCRIPTS so all of your reps are ready to communicate effectively with customers.

Provide 24/7 customer service support with Orderwave’s INTEGRATED IVR. Once set, your customers will have control over their accounts, having the ability to cancel, enroll in continuity, or simply check the status of their orders.

We realize that the success of your business goes hand in hand with the quality of customer service you deliver and we strongly feel that as Orderwave gives you the best CRM tools to keep your customers happy.

To learn more visit: http://ow2.orderwave.com/en_US/communication_tools or call us to schedule a free live demo 1(877) 364-7158

If your business ships out products, ask yourself one question: how easy is it to keep track of your entire inventory, shipping costs, shipping updates, tracking numbers, cancellations, you get the drill. Whether you’re selling 10 or 10,000 products daily, keeping track of all your business operations is easier when you have an order management system that can keep things in order. With Orderwave, keeping track of every aspect of an order is easier when it’s all in one place.

Aside from making your life easier, an order management system like Orderwave can help you build trust with your customers, and not to mention, garner you a lot of positive feedback for your professionalism and quick turnaround.    

Orderwave makes it easy to keep track of every order, every item in your inventory, every transaction and most importantly, your money. Our intuitive interface makes it easy to navigate and our custom reports make it easy to see your monthly, weekly, daily activity, giving you ultimate control over your business.

Features like the ones mentioned below, make it easy for your business to move forward. And guess what? Because we believe in cloud computing, everything you need is stored in one centralized location. Think of it as the Orderwave cloud where you can use features like:

·         Shopping cart integration

·         Simple 1-2 page checkout

·         Order status

·         Tracking numbers

·         Continuity cancellation/renewal

·         Powerful CRM tools

Orderwave also makes it easy to keep track of your inventory, and if you have a large supply of inventory, it notifies you when you’re running low. How convenient is that! In short, an order management system as advanced, intuitive and stable as Orderwave will save you time, money and headaches.

See: Features for ECommerce

Call to schedule a free demo today with and Orderwave specialist 1 (877) 364-7158.  

Orderwave is pretty fast – and sometimes it’s too fast!  When an order has been charged/approved, it’s often already had inventory deducted and reserved for it by the time you may need to void/refund it.

Now, you’ll have the option to reverse that inventory deduction when a void/refund is approved.  This option is only available for orders that haven’t been batched for shipment in Carrier Connect, so it won’t affect orders that have already shipped (or about to be shipped).  This feature will help you maintain more accurate levels of inventory, because refunded orders won’t inadvertently reserve inventory.

You’ve always had access to this function separately – it’s located under “Shipment Functions” when viewing an order.

Viewing/administering continuity

We’ve just rolled out some changes to the way to can view and administer continuity orders.

Now, when viewing a continuity order, you’ll no longer be prompted with a dialog box that you have to deal with before viewing the order, instead, you’ll be presented with the following alert:

This new information box lets you know:

a)      That this is a continuity order, an order spawned by Orderwave because of a membership in an autoship program

b)      What place in the shipment count this order falls in (i.e. This is continuity order #3)

c)       The parent (original) order number with a link to view it.

Additionally, you used to have to view the parent order to administer the continuity enrollment – this is no longer necessary!  Now you can view the continuity enrollment simply by using the “Continuity” tab right on this page.

However, when dealing with “autoship membership” that is enabled on the parent line-item, you will still need to enroll/cancel/change that parent line-item.

Continuity Cancellation

While there is a distinction between cancelling an order, and cancelling someone out of a continuity program, many new users simply cancel and order and assume that the continuity enrollment will be cancelled as well.  There are operational reasons why this may work as a means to stop the customer from receiving future shipments, but for reporting reasons, the customer will still be “enrolled”.

To remedy this problem, we’ve included the ability to cancel all continuity memberships when cancelling an order:

Now you (and your reps) can do all of the cancelling you need in 1 dialog, keeping your reporting accurate and your operations precise.

While Orderwave lets you enroll a customer in multiple continuity programs, you may have noticed that Orderwave only lets you enroll them in the same continuity program once.  In other words, you can’t enroll a customer in “MEMBERSHIP-PLAN-1” twice.  Well, until now.

We’re introducing a new feature called a continuity quantity multiplier.  Basically, it will let you enroll a customer in a continuity program and specify the quantity of the items that they’ll be receiving.  Remember, the quantity of the products the customer is getting is defined in the Continuity Profiles section – when you’re adding a quantity multiplier, you’re actually saying that the customer should receive “X” times the quantity specified in the Continuity Profiles section.

Math is fun, so let’s run through an example.  If you have a continuity profile that includes 2 books in step 1, and you include a quantity multiplier of 2 for Jane Doe’s membership, she’ll actually receive 4 of the books.  If the step also included 1 buyer’s guide, she’d receive 4 of the books and 2 buyer’s guides.

But how is shipping handled?  Well, a couple of different ways – talk to your account rep for the specific options.

Want to start using it?  Here’s how you’d add a quantity multiplier to a continuity membership.

Click the “Edit” link on the continuity membership.

Enter the quantity that you’d like the customer to receive in the correct field.  We won’t accept “1” – it just doesn’t make sense.  Also, if you enter a number greater than 2, we’ll alert you and ask you if you’re sure.  We don’t want somebody accidentally receiving 5,000 copies of the same item by accident.

Once configured, you’ll see that it’s enabled:

We’ll also add notes to the order for you, so you can see who added it.

That’s the basics – remember to talk to your account rep about setting this up for your orders!

Orderwave internally keeps track of the tax rate on your items/orders, so when it comes time to calculate charges, Orderwave takes the work off of your hands and calculates the individual tax amounts for you.  But what about when one of the tax rates is wrong?  Or you’re no longer shipping the product to a destination where you charge tax?  You may need to give a custom tax refund.

This is what the items look like on a typical order in the terminal:

In this example, this order has already been charged and we’re going to give a tax refund.  You can see that Orderwave keeps track of the tax that was charged (in the tax column) for each item.  If you wanted to refund an item, you could just check it off and recalculate:

After recalculating, you’ll see the total in the “process” button:

You can see that the tax is already calculated, and the total for all 7 of the items + the tax is $22.66.  Now let’s edit the tax so that we can give a tax refund on this order.  All you have to do is click on the tax amount for the item.

Whenever you click on the tax amount and turn it into a field, you’re instructing Orderwave that you’d like to manually override the tax amount.  When you haven’t turned it into a field, you’re letting Orderwave calculate it.

Let’s set this up for a full tax refund:

There’s 3 important parts of this. 1) both items are “checked” 2) the item prices are $0.00 and 3) the taxes have been clicked and turned into fields.

Now when the transaction is performed, the transaction amount will correctly be filed as a tax refund.

File this one under “powerful features that you need to start using” – I’m here to let you know about the Orderwave Calendar, a really useful tool for teams inside of Orderwave.

The Orderwave Calendar is a shared calendar that your team can use to coordinate timed events, appointments, and tasks in your account.  Calendar appointments can be standalone events, like an interoffice meeting, or they can be linked to an order – a useful way to provide reminders on sensitive orders.

To create an order-linked appointment, navigate to an order, and select “Add a linked calendar appointment” under the “Action” tab on the right.

You’ll get a interface that lets you add a subject, an optional description, a date/time, a length (useful for meetings), and an optional reminder.   If you’ve chosen to have a reminder, you’ll also have the ability to have other users get the reminder.  You can specify entire groups of users, or specifically choose the users who you’d like to share the reminder with.

Speaking of reminders, you can choose between a pop-up reminder within Orderwave, an email reminder, or both.  Pop-up reminders work great when you’re already working inside of Orderwave – perfect for users who spend all day logged in.  The pop-up will also be accompanied by a chime, so you won’t miss it if you’re working in another program.

To create a standalone appointment, just click anywhere on the calendar module on the Home Tab.  This appointment interface is identical to the one above, with the exception that it is not linked to anything.

The calendar module on the Home Tab will give show you the next 2 upcoming appointments in your account, so to see all of the appointments in a month by month view, click the “View Calendar” link on the calendar module.  This will show you all of the appointments that have been created by you and other users that you are linked to.

I hope that you can find yourself and your team getting comfortable with these powerful new features – it’s a great way to share and disseminate information in your account in a secure and organized way.

If your organization is growing, chances are you’ve got (or would like to have) multiple locations where your ship your product from.  You may even have several fulfillment vendors throughout the country or world and would like to intelligently route orders to the correct organization.

Well, we’re happy to introduce location routing in Orderwave 2.0.  Some of you savvy Orderwave users may already know about (and use) this feature, since it’s been around for a few months now, but until now, we haven’t done a formal introduction.

What is location routing?  It’s a dynamic way to tell Orderwave what type of orders should be routed to which locations – based on items, geographic destination, item availability, or customer type.  You can even mix and match combinations of these rules to create the most efficient system for your company.

Let’s start with some examples…

Multiple fulfillment vendors

You’ve got your inventory sitting at your fulfillment vendors locations, or even multiple warehouse locations under the umbrella of the same vendor.  If the locations are distributed around the country, you may want to think about using geographic location routing.  This type of routing compares the orders’ delivery address to your shipping table and allows you to route to locations based on the best match.  You might have different shipping rates in your shipping table for Alaska and Hawaii, and you might only want orders to those states to be shipped from California – or you may setup your shipping table to route based proximity to the closest fulfillment location.

Item (SKU) based routing

Some fulfillment locations only contain certain items – so it’s an absolute must that the orders be fulfilled from those locations.  When you setup your location routing this way, you’re ensuring that items will definitely ship from certain locations.

Routing based on availability

It’s a possibility that you don’t really care where it ships from, you just want to make sure that you’re depleting the inventory that you already have.  In this case, you’ll want to enable availability routing.  This type of routing looks at the QOH (quantity on hand) of your warehouses and routes the order based on where it will successfully ship from, with a preference on depleting the most available inventory first.

Routing based on customer type

When you’ve got your customer list setup in Orderwave (entirely optional), you can assign groups to your customers and use these groups as a way to route your fulfillment.  You may only want to ship orders to your distributers from your warehouse/fulfillment vendor, while taking care of the customer orders from your own office.

Any of the above types of rules can be enabled concurrently, meaning that you can combine them.  In this case, you can setup one of the rules as a “tie-breaker”.  If more than one rule applies to the order, the tie-breaker will win and route the order according to its settings.

We’ve made some changes to the continuity (order-detail) UI.  First, for continuity profiles that contain a final step that repeats indefinitely, a number will generate next to the “current step” value that indicates the number of shipments that have been generated.  In the example below, the customer is still on step 1 of the program, but it has repeated 10 times.

Next, for continuity profiles that do not have a repeating last step, the UI will now indicate when the customer has reached the end of the program.  Even if an administrator goes back and edits the program to make the last step repeat, this indicator will still display this message for customers that have reached their end of the program.

Finally, and not continuity related, We’ve added a new interface element that should help you navigate your many open tabs in OW2.

When you click this button, you OW2 will generate a list of the current open tabs in the interface.

They will be listed in the order that they have been created (or sorted to), and you can click on them to quickly navigate to the corresponding tab. 

Now, when designing continuity profiles, you can create continuity coupons; discounts that customer service representatives can apply to certain continuity shipments for “save the sale” purposes. 

Continuity coupons can be designed to provide percentage or flat dollar-amount discounts to continuity orders.  When choosing “dollar-based” discounts, you can have Orderwave distribute the discount amount among the items on the order, or have the discount amount be applied to each item on the order.  In the example above, the continuity order will have a maximum of a $5 discount, distributed among the items on the order.  If the “distribute” option was not enabled, and the continuity order contained 2 $10 items, the customer would receive a $5 discount for each item – for a total of a $10 discount.  The “distribute” option is turned on by default, because it is likely the most desired option.

When designing a continuity coupon that provides a percentage-based discount, you’ll have the option to provide a ceiling for the maximum dollar amount for the resulting discount.  This is useful for providing a discount like “20% off for up to $20”.

You can also constrain your coupon to only affect certain items from inventory.  By default, all items on a continuity order are affected; by constraining the coupon to certain items, you can make sure that discounts are only applied to items of your choice.  It is notable to mention that when you map certain inventory items to a coupon, specifying how shipping is affected is no longer needed/evaluated (because shipping is not mapped as an inventory item).

When viewing an order, you can choose to apply coupons to future continuity orders.

You’ll be able to specify the coupon you’d like to use and the shipment numbers you’d like to apply it to.  You can only apply 1 coupon per shipment.  When you apply or remove a continuity coupon to shipments, a note will be generated for you on the order.