Endless Aisle and Delivery
This page covers the two ways to sell an item that will not go home with the customer today: an order fulfilled from another store, and a delivery order fulfilled from this store. They look similar on screen, but they take opposite money. Read The two kinds of order first if you have not, because the rest of this page depends on it.
Selling from another store
When you scan or search for an item and it is not available in this store, you do not have to stop there. Open the cross-store panel. It shows, store by store, what is genuinely on hand, along with the delivery estimate your business has configured. When nothing is in stock anywhere, the panel says so plainly instead of leaving you looking at an empty list.
Choose the store that will fulfill the order, and choose how the customer wants it: collect from that store, or shipped to the customer.
A few things the app will insist on:
- A named customer. An order cannot be placed for a walk-in. Attach an existing customer, or create one on the spot. See Attaching a Customer.
- A delivery address, when the order is being shipped to the customer. You choose this from the customer's saved addresses, described below.
- The order rides its own transaction. When your basket also has items the customer is taking today, the app will not let them travel together. Sell the take-now items as one sale and the ordered items as another.
That last rule surprises people, so it is worth knowing why. Every check the store's system applies to an order is applied to the whole document, not line by line. Putting one ordered line into a basket would sweep the take-now items into the order too, and they would lose the stock and serial checks that protect them. Two transactions keep both sets of checks intact.
When you place the order, it is booked and the paperwork is raised, and nothing is taken from the till and nothing leaves this store's shelf. The customer pays at collection or delivery, at the store that fulfills the order.
To use cross-store selling at all, your business turns on cross-store trading company-wide, and the stores you sell from are marked as sellable. When cross-store trading is off, the cross-store panel is refused and the message names the setting.
Choosing the delivery address
Whenever an order is shipped to the customer, whether it is an order from another store or a delivery order from this store, you set where it goes by choosing an address, not by typing one loosely.
- Pick a saved address. The app shows the addresses the customer already has on file. Choose the one the goods should go to.
- Add a new address, when the delivery order flow offers it. A new address needs a street, a city, and a country, and the country is chosen from a list. The address must belong to the customer on the sale. Adding a new address needs the order permission, so in some parts of the app you will pick an existing address rather than add one.
- One address per order. An order goes to a single place, however many delivery plans sit on it. Two destinations mean two orders.
Choosing the address is what sets the true destination for the order, so pick the one the customer actually wants.
Taking a delivery order
This is the other lane. The goods are here, and they are going out on a delivery.
- Build the basket and open the order screen.
- A delivery plan attaches. The plan carries the dates and the delivery charge. It attaches automatically when your store has a default, or you choose one. When different items are going out on different days, you can move them onto their own plans, and each group then has its own delivery date. The plan and its options are described in Quotations and Fulfillment Plans.
- Set the delivery address, as described above.
- Delivery charges are worked out by the store's system from the plan's own setup. You do not type them.
- The order will not complete until it has a named customer, a plan, every line on a plan, and an address. These four are checked again by the store's system when the order is submitted, not only when the screen lets you continue.
- Take the deposit. This is one payment. On a store today the deposit is taken in cash, on a till with a drawer. Card is available as a deposit once your acquirer is certified. On account, store credit, and loyalty are not offered for a deposit. Because a cash deposit needs a drawer, a phone with no drawer cannot take a delivery order today; use a till with a drawer, or a register. Taking payment is covered in Payments and Tender.
- The order books, and the screen shows you what was created: the paperwork, the deposit taken, the delivery promise, and whether stock is genuinely being kept for it, using the store's own figures.
Delivering an order later
An order you booked earlier is delivered from the same order screen. From its empty state, open the delivery lookup and search this store's booked orders. Open one, and you will see what is still outstanding, taken from the store's own record of what has already gone out rather than worked out again on the phone.
Several orders cannot be delivered from the phone, and each refusal names exactly where the order does belong:
- An order with a serialized or batch-tracked item is delivered at a register, where the unit is scanned. The refusal tells you that nothing has been charged and the order is unchanged.
- An order from another store hands over at the fulfilling store.
- A layaway has its own screen. See Split Tender and Layaway.
- An order booked in a different currency than this till trades in.
- Orders whose lines ship from another store, have already been returned against, or have already been partly delivered. A delivery covers everything still outstanding on a line, not part of a line's quantity.
When there is a balance left, the customer settles it at a register first, and then you deliver here. Settling the balance by card on the device is available once your acquirer is certified. When the order is in credit, meaning the customer is owed money, that refund is settled at a register before anything is delivered.
When the delivery goes through, the goods are released and the app moves you to the receipt. See Delivering a Receipt.