workflow/process support & contact manager

Nearly everything we sell requires a series of tasks to be executed to deliver the goods, including procurement - with some netting & batching, sub-contract work, inspections, and preparation for shipping. Is anyone working on these kind of things?

We also have some pre-sale work which involves looking at the cart, suggesting other items, making client appointments to visit us, reserving items to show at the appointment and returning them. Any interest or offers?

One of our divisions needs a simple contact manager for account clients to use inside zen cart so they can manage their own contacts and follow up. Nice if it was Ajax enabled. Has anyone seen such a thing?

jungles:

Nearly everything we sell requires a series of tasks to be executed to deliver the goods, including procurement - with some netting & batching, sub-contract work, inspections, and preparation for shipping. Is anyone working on these kind of things?

That is possible to be made, but as far as I can see most of them need to be done through extensive communication with your clients rather than an instant process in an e-commerce site?

Say for the sub-contract part, I can't seem to think about anything else other than they submit up a job requirements through a form, then you replied to them, and they replied back etc. which process would be way faster if you arrange a meeting somewhere rather than waiting for the other guy's response.

Orr... you can add live chat mod on top of that, just to support.

jungles:

We also have some pre-sale work which involves looking at the cart, suggesting other items, making client appointments to visit us, reserving items to show at the appointment and returning them. Any interest or offers?

interesting... pm me, maybe we can work something out...

jungles:

One of our divisions needs a simple contact manager for account clients to use inside zen cart so they can manage their own contacts and follow up. Nice if it was Ajax enabled. Has anyone seen such a thing?

not in zen-cart. I think its safer to have the admin area for the contact manager in a separate site rather than combining them with zen-cart admin. This way they can't do anything funny (accidentally or not) with your website.

Good luck in this project, jungles :wink:

It seems like there is a growing interest in building ZenCart into an ERP solution.

I would love to see something like that but I don't know if that is more complex (and time intensive) than the creators and community can/want to do.

Jungles (I don't know if you are following this anymore, but...), sounds like you want something more along the lines of a CRM solution. SugarCRM might be what you need (and it is open source and free).

There was some talk on blog about a quickbooks + zencart + sugarCRM mashup. I don't think the zencart + sugarCRM idea went anywhere but there is integration btwn zen and quickbooks.
'http://chasesagum.com/quickbooks-plugin-for-zen-cart'

Also I google this forum and found something sugarCRM related but maybe not what we want (haven't checked it yet):

SHINE Live Help Sidebox - FREEWARE
'http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...roducts_id=439'
'http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/shinelivehelp/'

Sidebox for SHINE Live Help. Live Support for your website that integrates easily with SugarCRM.