First off, best wishes for the new year! Our last post was about improving order administration efficiency in non-automated ways. Today we’re discussing 3 ways to handle orders quicker by automating the process.

1 – Automatically ship and invoice orders that have confirmed payments

If you’re offering payment methods that capture payments when the user checks out, the payment processing system will send a confirmation message back to your webshop. By automatically shipping and invoicing orders that get a payment confirmation from your payment processor (payment service provider), many clicks can be saved. You should carefully align this automation to your desired process. For instance, some shops only want to create an invoice after a shipment has received a tracking code. Think hard about implicit rules such as these and write them down before you engage a developer!

2 – Run daily batch jobs that handle orders that are pending for too long

There is a percentage of customers that presses the BUY button, goes through checkout and reaches the payment service provider, but after that do nothing or just close their browser. For some shops this percentage can amount to 5-10% of total orders. In Magento these kinds of orders would stay in status “pending” indefinately until the shop owner cancels them. If your store gets a fair amount of these orders, having a developer create a small piece of software that cancels these orders for you can help greatly.

3 – Integrate invoice creation with book-keeping software

Do you print out your webshop’s invoices only to type them in again in your book-keeping software? This can be a major waste of time. A much less time-consuming way is to have Magento send your invoice information to your bookkeeping software the moment an invoice is created. For many of the larger bookkeeping packages, invoicing integrations with Magento already exist.

When the above automations are done, you will have a shop that processes confirmed payments into invoices and shipments, sends invoice information to your bookkeeper and that automatically deals with pending orders. You can focus on the fun stuff!