Order Handler

After receiving the e-mail notification that someone has placed an order in your store, you can come to the orders section of the back office to view payment information. Payment information is not sent by e-mail because e-mail is not secure. Viewing or downloading your orders from your browser is secure if you have configured your store to use secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol (e.g., https://). To tell ShopSite to use SSL go to the "Technical Settings" section under "Config" in the back office.

Note: you will not see the buttons below unless you have orders.

Show Order - Select the order or orders in your list that you would like to view, and click on the show order button. You can view one, several, or all of your orders this way.

Bill Order - This button will only appear if you are using automatic credit card authorization via PaymentNet or CyberCash. In a nutshell, the way PaymentNet works is credit cards are authorized in real time. If the card is bad, the customer will be notified of that and invited to enter another card. Therefore, if the order appears in the orders section of the back office, you know that the payment has already been authorized. However, the card will not be billed until you select the transaction from the list in the back office and click the Bill Order button. After you have billed the order, delete the order using the Delete Order button (see below). If you do not wish to complete the transaction, you may delete the order without billing it.

Delete Order - Just as you can view one, several, or all your orders at once, you can delete them from your record. Be careful you don't delete your orders before you have collected payment information.

Periodically, it is a good idea to record your orders and delete them. A good way to keep the information on file is to View all your orders by selecting them all from the list, then hit the Show Order button, then save the page as a text file in your Web browser. That should be a feature under the File menu on your browser.

Download Orders
Clicking this button downloads your orders in a tab-delimited format to your local computer. With this feature you could have a simple program extract the order information and place it in a local database or process it in some manner.

Each line in the downloaded file is an order (except for the first line). The first line indicates the name of each field and the order that it is found in the remaining records. For example the first four fields of the first record (line) would contain:

Date OrderNum Name Company

The next two records might have the following in the first four fields:

Thu Nov 20 14:55:11 1997 1235 Joe Cool Open Market, Inc.
Thu Nov 20 16:35:31 1997 1236 Sally Smith <empty >

Each field is separated by a tab. The first field is the date and time the order was placed, the second is the order number, the third is the customer name, and the fourth field is the company name. Note that in the second order Sally did not enter a company name so the word ' <empty >' is listed.

You can determine what most of the field names mean by their name such as "Price," "GrandTotal," and "SKU." However, a couple of fields need further explanation.

"PayType" contains a number that indicates the payment method as follows:

0 - Visa
1 - MasterCard
2 - Discover
3 - American Express
4 - Purchase Order
5 - C.O.D.
6 - Check
7 - (unused)
8 - Generic 1
9 - Generic 2

"NumItems" indicates how many separate products were ordered (not to be confused with "Quantity," which indicates the amount of a product that was ordered.) For example, if Sally orders 5 copies of the book Selling on the Web using ShopSite then NumItems would be 1 and Quantity would be 5. But if Joe orders 1 copy of Selling on the Web using ShopSite and 1 copy of ShopSite for Dummies then NumItems would be 2 and Quantity would be 1 each time it is displayed in the order record. Note that all fields related to a product would be repeated in the order record for Joe, because Joe ordered two separate products. It is therefore important for a program to read the NumItems field so that the number of remaining fields can be correctly calculated for that order record.

Note: when you select Download the default file name is orderhandler.exe or orderhandler.cgi (depending on your client OS). This file is not an executable, it is a tab-delimited text file.

"Finite Options" corresponds to any pull-down menu options a customer selected (e.g., small, medium, large, or x-large).

"Freeform Options" are for text-boxes where the customer typed in a sentence.

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