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.
You can now alter the text that is automatically generated by the OW2 Web Portal, providing alternate versions of the text that was already there, or by translating the text into another language altogether. Anybody speak Klingon?
You can find this feature under Tools > Web Portal (ask your administrator for access if you don’t see it).
Once you access the tool, you’ll see a list of text-snippets that you’ve translated. To translate more text, just click the “Add new translation” link.
You’ll have access to all of the automatically-generated text from the Web Portal. Just scroll-through or search the list for the text you’d like to change.
Click on the text you’d like to change, and you’ll get a text-box where you can provide your version.
Your translated text will appear on your web portal immediately:
Now, when editing a campaign, you can choose to override your return address, return instructions, and account logo.
You’ll be able to specify a different return address:
A different set of return instructions:
And a different logo: (you can choose a current logo or upload new logos)
When creating packing slips, these values will replace the defaults only for orders that are tagged with that particular campaign.
Pretty soon we’re going to be rolling out changes to the order-detail interface that will change the way you cancel orders. These changes are coming about because we wanted to tighten-up the behavior of cancelled orders – specifically, we wanted to clean up some of the breadcrumbs that are created when an order simply stops being valid.
The most notable change for our users will be that we’re no longer going to allow you to “reactivate” orders once they’ve been cancelled. We’re going to give you plenty of warning about this in the interface, so there shouldn’t be any confusion. Why are we doing this? Well, when you cancel an order, we no longer consider the order valid, and behind the scenes we clean up a lot of the junk left behind by it – this makes your account faster and more efficient. Allowing users to reactivate orders means that we need to put all of the stuff we removed back into place, exactly where it was. Also, we weren’t really happy with the workflow aspect of reactivating orders. For example, it creates a lot of strange looking results in you reports when an order has been removed from the workflow, then inexplicably added back in. To alleviate any concerns, creating a “re-ship” will provide similar results to reactivating an order, but of course, it will create a new order (better for your workflow and reports!).
We’re also going to be limiting the time-window when you can cancel orders. Cancelling an order after it’s been dispatched, for example, doesn’t make a lot of sense. The customer will still receive the package – and now you’ve got an order in a cancelled state that has been charged and shipped. Pretty soon you won’t be able to cancel orders that have shipment data (the tracking number will be needed to be voided first) or packing slips.
When you click the cancel button, you’ll be presented with a dialog that looks like this:
Depending on the state of the order, you’ll be presented with different options to accompany the cancellation process. In this example, you’ll be required to cancel the future scheduled payments for the order, and you’ll have the option to clear any “to-do’s” for the order. If the order had been deducted, you’d have the option to reverse the inventory deduction and return the items to inventory. If there is a balance between what we’ve charged and what we’ve refunded (or voided), you’ll get notified too so that you can perform a refund (if necessary).
We hope these changes will tighten up your accounts, provide better functionality, and maintain cleaner, more understandable reporting.
We’ve added a new option under the “PDF Options” tab in Carrier Connect:
Checking this box will prevent the return label from generating on the packing slips. It’s an account-setting, so it will be remembered after you specify it.
You can now search within a Carrier Connect batch.
You can search by order number (or order number 2) or keyword.
The matching search results will be sorted at the top of the list, along with the rest of the batch.
