Brick-and-Mortar Walk-in Retail

[savanik]

I work for a computer parts and repair shop, we're trying to implement Zencart to provide for online sales. We're also going to use Zencart to take over our inventory control. That's the easy part. We also want it to handle customer accounts. That's harder, but it can wait. The problem: I've been hitting nothing but speedbumps so far with setting up the site for walk-in customers.

Issue #1: Cash Customers
A customer walks in, picks up a part, hands us cash, and says, 'I'd like this.'

I don't need to know their name, their shipping address, their date of birth. I don't need to know anything other than what they're buying so I can deduct it from inventory and add the cash to assets.

How the heck am I supposed to do this? The best solution I've thought of so far was to create an account called 'Cash' and somehow automagically set it up so that only admins (i.e., register clerks) could charge things to it. Somehow. This doesn't seem like a very good solution, but I've yet to think of a better one.


Issue #2: Service Orders
A customer walks in, hands us a computer, and says, 'Fix it.'

We need a way to create service orders for specific customers and then keep them in the system without finalizing their sale until the service order is finished and billed to the customer. A way of keeping technician's notes on the system would also be right handy.

Isn't there some way to create an order for a customer and put it on 'hold' until their account is settled?


Those are my major problems at the moment. I can deal with printing physical receipts later. :) Any help would be appreciated! I've searched all over the forums for these topics and been coming up blank.

Craig Rickel
Tech Gurus

[pasi]

I was thinking the same way some 4 years ago when setting up my first zencart shop... I wanted it to do stocks, customer management etc...

But then I realized it's a webshop software, not a business management software...

Get a decent program for your "IRL" customers and try to get it hooked up with zencart!

[savanik]

We've actually got SugarCRM for long-term customer management, and Quickbooks for the accounting side - I think my boss might simply be pushing to see what we really think Zencart can do. :) But mostly what we want Zencart to do is to function as the in-store register at the counter. We don't need to read in bar-codes or do anything fancy, just be able to record that someone bought X for Y dollars and that there's one less in inventory. And I don't see any particular reason why it couldn't function like that.

If we got a different program to do the in-store stuff, then I personally have no clue how we'd synchronize some nameless database (probably proprietary) managing our inventory with Zencart's inventory. Wouldn't it be easier just to have one, single, centralized inventory?

Seriously said - what is a good alternative for this purpose we won't have to spend $1000's or more on? We're just one store - we can't afford to run two separate inventories side-by-side. It has to integrate with Zencart. And the easiest way I can think of for that is to use Zencart itself.

Craig Rickel
Tech Gurus