How Does the 'Order Fulfillment' Section Work?

This Article is Currently Being Written

The "Order Fulfillment" section of links, located in the Market Manager box of the Your Account page, is a set of tools for those markets who wish to electronically check in growers and check out customers. It was primarily written with portable devices, such as iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads, but will also work on laptop and netbook computers, desktop computers, and portable devices with full web browsers, such as Android phones.

The section assume the following things:

1. The growers remove the items they know they can't fill prior to delivery, using their own "View Open Orders" page. At my market, they have a strict deadline, 90 minutes before they are supposed to show up with their items.

2. The market managers pay the growers when they drop off their products. At my market, after the deadline for adjusting orders, I use the CSV export to bring the grower's sales amounts into my check software and print checks.

If you don't do either of those things, the system should still work, but you may need to alter when and how you do them to fit into your flow. I've found doing it this way greatly reduces my work as market manager and makes the market work most effeciently, but your circumstances may be different.

There are six main actions.

The first three are suitable for use by market volunteers (a special class of account that has doesn't have full administrative rights to the website), and you can give your volunteers access to them by clicking on the "Give Your Volunteers Access to the Above Three Actions" link. This will display the first three links in the Volunteers box, so your volunteers can access them when signed in using their own accounts. They will only have access to them when ordering is turned off, as they are intended for use only during the order fulfillment stage of the ordering cycle.

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Here are the first three actions, along with a short description:

Check in a Grower Delivery

If you like to check off each item as a grower delivers it to you, this is the place to do it. At my Athens, GA market, we have over 100 growers, so we only check in those with confusing items or a history of inaccurate deliveries. Checking them in makes the rest of the day go much more smoothly.

There is a summarized list of items sold at the top of the screen, along with a "Mark as Here" link. Down below is a list of the individual orders, sorted by item and the customer's place in line. Clicking on "Mark as Here" will turn the row for that item green, and hide the individual orders for that item. If something is missing, scroll down to the individual orders and click "mark missing". It will turn that order red. If that person ordered more than one, you'll need to click once for each missing item. So, if they ordered three jugs of milk but there is only one, click twice, and two jugs will be recorded as missing.

Missing items are permanently recorded, and will be flagged so that the grower's share of the sales price will be deducted from their grower account (so you can take it out of their next check). If you refresh the page, the missing items will still show as missing, but any items marked as present get reset. That's OK -- only the missing items are saved, and everything else is presumed to be present.

If you have not yet written the checks or otherwise paid the grower, rather than using this section, you may wish to ue the "View Open Orders for a Single Grower" page to permanently remove undelivered items instead of merely flagging them as missing. That option is not available to market volunteers, however.

Check out a Customer's Order

This action has two different versions, depending on what device you use to view it. If you visit the page on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you get a simpler view with large type, specially designed for those screens. At my market, my volunteers use those small handheld devices as they're filling orders, since they're much easier to carry around.

Check Out: On an iPhone or iPod Touch

On those devices, they see at the top a dropdown list of all of the customers with orders that week, arranged alphabetically by last name. If a customer has placed more than one order, they will be in the list more than once, but it does not matter which one gets selected. Once a name is selected, the screen shows the customer's information, the number of orders, and the expected combined total for all the orders. Then, a combined product listing is shown, arranged alphabetically by grower. Each item has two links: "One Packed" and "One Missing".

If "One Packed" is touched, the line turns green. If the customer ordered more than one of the item, the link will have to be pressed once for each item. The row will turn yellow until the final item is marked packed, and then the row will turn green.

If "One Missing" is touched, the row will turn red. If the customer ordered more than one of the item, the link will again have to be pressed once for each item. It is possible to mix the two: one packed, two missing, for example. Any items marked as missing during Grower Check In will already be shown as missing here. Anything marked as missing on this screen will be flagged to have the grower's share of the sales price deducted from their grower account (so you can take it out of their next check).

Below the list of items is two links: "Mark as Packed" and "Mark as Picked Up". If the market worker is pre-packing a box for the customer, they can click "Mark as Packed" to indicate that they have completed that order. If they are handing the items directly to the customer, they can click "Mark as Picked Up". Either one will turn any remaining items green, so they should be sure they have completely filled all the items before they mark either one. They can also do both separately, so if they pre-pack the can click the first and then later when the customer arrives, they can click the second.

At the very bottom is the combined comments for the order, in case their are any special instructions the order packer needs to see.

Other than the expected total due, there is no payment options on this screen when viewed on an iPhone or iPod touch. For that, use another device.

Check Out: On an iPad, Laptop, or Other Device

To Be Written

View Orders Not Yet Picked Up

This screen shows each of the orders that have not yet been marked as having been picked up on the Check Out screen. At my market, I begin calling these people a half hour before they close, because if they do not arrive during the pickup window, they forfeit their items. This page can be viewed on any device, but it's especially handy on a mobile phone, because you can call the customers without leaving the page.

Each person is listed, in alphabetical order. Along with their name, it shows the order number, the total due, and their phone number. Below the phone number is a set of links to mark that you have called them, and what the response was: "Message", "Coming", "Bad #", or "Not Coming". When you click any of them, a little phone icon shows (so you can see that you've called them already), and the response gets saved to the comments of each of their orders. If you refresh the page, the phone icon will disappear, but you'll see the comment.

If the order has a total due of zero, you'll also see a link to "Mark as Picked Up & Paid From Account". This is handy for orders placed by growers or volunteers, or orders containing only free items like event reservations where there's nothing to pick up or pay for. Often times, those sorts of orders get filled outside the normal process, so this is a simple way to mark the orders as paid without going to the Check Out screen for each one.

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The last three actions are only available to market managers, since they directly affect customer accounts and account balances. Here they are, along with a short description:

View Items Needing to be Refunded

Any items flagged as needing to be refunded during the order checkout process will be listed here. Usually, these are items that were thought missing when the customer picked up their order, but were later found. If a customer pre-paid from their account balance, missing items will automatically get refunded, and they will also appear here.

The list is there for you to look over. The refunds will not get processed until you click the "Issue Refunds for all the Following Items" at the top of the page. Doing so will issue refunds to the customer's account and send an email to the customer letting them know.

View Items Needing to be Charged Back to the Growers

Any items flagged as missing during the grower check in or during the order checkout process will be listed here. They are items that the grower sold and should have delivered, but did not.

The list is there for you to look over. When you click the "Charge the Growers for all the Following Items" at the top of the page, the grower's portion of the sales price will be charged back to the grower's balance, and an email will be sent to the grower letting them know.

This primarily assumes that you paid the grower when they arrived, thinking they brought what they were supposed to. If you have not paid them yet, these items will show as a negative account balance and will be taken out of their total due.

One other thing to be careful of: if you have already paid the growers, be sure to zero out their balances before you issue the charge backs, to clear out and outstanding balance from the previous cycle and personal orders that were already deducted from their sales. Issuing chargebacks should be one of the very last things you do when preparing your market to open for the following order cycle.

View Order Payment Summary

This screen is mostly informational. It shows all of the orders and how they were paid for, as indicated during the checkout process. They are sorted by payment type, and then by customer name. If you need to edit either the order or the checkout information, there are links to both. I sometimes edit the order to issue refunds or credits for items outside the normal checkout process (i.e., they wrote a check for $300 for a $75 order, and need the rest credited to their account), and edit the checkout info to change the payment method (i.e., it was marked as "Charge Account" when it should have been marked that they had pre-paid.)

At the bottom is a total of each of the payment methods, which is useful when you're preparing your bank deposit, to make sure you're in the right ballpark. I don't balance my cash box to the penny, but if I'm within $20 or so, everything's good.

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And that's the Order Fulfillment section. Using it has saved me from printing out hundreds of pages a week, essentially wasting all that paper. Our host business put in a WiFi network, and I found several refurbished iPod Touches for very cheap. Several customers donated old model iPhones they had lying around after they upgraded as well. One of our volunteer cashiers brings her own iPad, and I bought another. Besides saving all that paper, I now spend a couple hours less a week reconciling books and manually issuing refunds. Order fulfillment errors have dropped way down to almost zero. The volunteers love it, and the customers think it's magic. What I started as something that I thought would be "nice" has really transformed our market, and suddenly gives us a lot more room to grow using the resources (space, time, and labor) we thought were about maxed out.