Hedd Gwynfor, Cadwyn Ltd
Admin Tools – improve your management efficiency
Wow, you are an admin now!
It must be rather excited to upload your first product and harvest the first order. Then you want to be quicker and easier just as many store owners did.
Frankly speaking, Zen Cart admin management is must better than osCommerce. If you have been working on osCommerce shopping cart like we did, you will have less complaining on Zen Cart.
However, there are plenty space left to improve Zen Cart admin management efficiency. Here are several clues you can think of:
Catalog Management
With less than 50 products, you can update catalog manually. If you have more than 200 products, how long can you update the new stock level of the catalog? Maybe an entire exhausted day.
Luckily, some lazy pioneers solved this headache. You can use Easy Populate to update massive catalogs. All you need to do is “Edit CSV file in EXCEL and upload” it. It takes only 30 minutes to update 200 products stock level. That’s 8 times efficiency improvement.
Now, you don’t want to do massive update, but only change a few products. You can do this by finding those products in Admin->Catalog->Categories/Products, click on each of them and then update. This tedious process can cost you 2 minutes to update one product. However, if you use Quick Update to do the same job, you only need 30 seconds. Check the details here.
Orders Management
We suppose you have a mature online store, and deal with more than 20 orders per day. You need to check each order to see the following things:
1. Payment Status
2. Stock level
3. Customer Comment
Before you finally delivery the package, you will update order status several times and add tracking numbers. Oh, there can be more things you can think of, like print shipping label, invoice and packing slip.
If you are using USPS or AustPost, you may also need to go to their websites to submit shipping addresses to get the shipping label.
All of these activities are necessary. However, they are costing time and money! You can use Super Orders to do a batch of jobs together (update status, print shipping label, packing slip, invoice and add tracking number). You can also use integrated solutions, like USPS Total Solution to maximize the automation.
However, if you want to improve your order management to 5 stars level, you have to build your own order management software. We are glad to help you on this. It may be troublesome, but we love the challenge. Save 2 minutes on each order, equals $2,000 to $5,000 if you have a busy store.
Other admin management activities like “Newsletter, Coupon” will be discussed later. If you want to know the tips on release, you can subscribe our RSS or newsletter.
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