This feature was introduced in Znode 9.9

Commerce Portal Introduction

Each B2B company has buyers at customers, and each of those B2B buyers usually works with a salesperson. As they work with the salesperson, the salesperson will help start an order for them.

Often time these orders need some work, and there is incomplete or unknown information about the order that needs to be resolved.  This may be product quantities needed, where to ship, configuration, or any number of things.  In these cases, the salesperson starts to create an order even though there is missing and incomplete information.  From the admin console or storefront an order needs to be entered in a complete state before being saved.

The commerce portal allows starting an order that is incomplete and allows completing it later.

And there can be multiple teams helping with orders, each with a different capability and responsibility for orders. These teams work together to resolve the flags and finalize the orders. The ultimate goal is to get a complete order with all information. As information is completed and all flags get resolved on orders, they will get marked complete and sent for fulfillment.

Order processing at many companies is not as simple as adding a product to a cart, paying, and completing an order.  The complex industry, processes, and business needs may require orders to be worked on before they are complete.  The Znode Commerce Portal was created for this purpose.

Key Commerce Portal Features

For general order management, the commerce portal allows sales teams and order processing teams to log in to enter, and manage orders.  For orders later in the life cycle, they will be able to see the “in process”, and “past” order history. The Commerce portal is designed for teams managing orders and includes assigning a manager to a user, and even delegating their orders when going on vacation.

The commerce portal includes several advanced features that need to be present in the order management area of the admin console. These include several new configuration options, including – the ability to have multiple order classes (such as orders, quotes, pending orders, and more) at a system level. Order Types allow teams to set the type on an order and quickly set defaults for orders. Order flags allow adding to-do-like action items onto orders, that need to be processed, and marked complete. User groups allow grouping commerce portal users to give them different order visibility.

Additionally, the order management tools in the commerce portal include several advanced features.  Smart view provides several order views based on who the user is and their security - this will allow seeing the most relevant orders in the smart view rather than having to do complex searches.  Orders can be assigned to user groups so all users in that group can see the orders and work on them.  An advanced permission control system in the commerce portal allows for the creation of different roles to give different users different abilities in the commerce portal.

Quick status change buttons can be defined that will give users a button for each of the most common statuses that follow the current order status. Orders also include improved order status visualization - status is shown in different colors, and users can see the progress of the order in an order workflow.