The Quote/Invoicing Addon for CS-Cart v2.1 will be released in ~50 days. This is the perfect addon for shops doing custom work and one-off custom jobs. The addon enables the administrator to create online quotes and/or invoices which can be accepted by the customer and paid for online as if it were a product. Their are alot of features packed into this powerhouse money making addon so please see the screenies link below for more information.
If you are interested in this addon the development costs are very high but so far we have received 80% in donations to pay the development costs, please donate today if you are interested, Thank You - Sno
This is how the QI Addon works:
The customer submits a request for quote using the built-in quote form.
The store owner can then build (estimate) the quote and submit the quote back to the customer for approval.
If the customer declines the quote it is sent back to the store owner for review.
If the customer accepts the quote it can be paid for online immediately.
May be it is too late, but I will make a suggestion anyway. This mod can be done in a much simpler way:
Set up your customerizable product as configurable, with all the product configuration options, including # of screen printing colors, locations, etc. (this is an already built-in feature of CS-Cart)
When a buyer is interested in buying from the website, he can configure the products to exactly his requirements (already built-in feature of CS-cart)
Instead of making the payment while placing the order, just create a special payment method called “Place Order for Confirmation” or “Request for Quote”. In this step, make the mod in a way that the admin can set it up that the buyers don’t need to acutally pay the order, but rather clicking the “Request for Quote” button, and then the “Order” will be placed to the store, but would be treated differently from the back-end, call it “Request for Quote”. It would have exactly the same information as a real order, except that it has a flag, saying this is not a order yet, but a request for quote (only small mod: setting up the flag, create a unique payment method for “request for quote” or “Cutomer to Confirm”, allow admin to set up this particular “payment method” would be available during the initial “check-out” process, and then later on allow the same buy to “pay again” on the same “order”, or rather “request for quote”, ec.) – Most features here are already built in with CS-Cart as well.
From the backend, the store admin can look at the detailed requirements of the buyers, and change the product configuration price, etc, and then change the order status to something like “Order Confirmed, Wait for Payment”, or “Quoted, Customer Confirm”, or something like that, and the customer would receive an email, saying the quote is done (this is mostly already built-in features of CS-Cart)
Doing it this way, would allow the existing CS-CArt features to be used to its fullest extend, while minimize the workload in order to achieve the same requirements. In addition, a “request for quote” can be turned into an actual order.
I am in a stage of evaluating CS-CArt, and once I decide to go ahead with CS-CArt, this would be the way that I will have this feature built.
Hi Wei, somewhat valid points but very long winded way. I have done what you said pretty musch for the past 3 months and it is not the best, yes it is workable but no way as efficient as what the mod is offering, we do at least 40 - 50 quotes a week and boy can it get time consuming, altering al the products etc etc.
I will defo be sticking with my donantion and cant wait for the add on to be developed.
I expect more people to be lining up for this as its a real sale booster, we have a similar system we started to use for our offline sales 3 or 4 years ago and didnt realise just how many “quotes”/ “sales” we were losing out on till we started using the quote and pay system.
But thanks for your input and explaination which I am sure will help some others.
The issue that I would have with this add-on is that it is not convenient to convert the quote into an order as you have to manual enter free format text to describe what buyer is looking for.
I can use the product configuration feature to configure all my products, and price all possible configurations. I will need my request for quote to include product details, including any configurations that buyers choose so that once a quote is confirmed/accepted, it can be converted into an order with a push of a button, as the quote has already include all the details.
I think your requirements are different from mine, as you probably can’t set up all the pricing for all your product variations in the system, and that’s probably why you would need this add-on at the first place. As for me, I can set up all possible pricing, but I need to confirm all the details of an order before I let customers pay for it.
I have been requested by a school to provide a quotation before they buy; this could be a nice little earner and future spender.
Is there an ETA?[/quote]
The last update from CS as of today is Oct. 20th. Everytime I log into my helpdesk CS pushes the date date without even telling me. We will still need to bug test the addon and have them fix any issues. I would expect this to take ~2 weeks before everything is ironed out and ready for launch on a live site.
This is the last addon that CS will code for us as we have secured other developers who are beginning work on cleaning up one of the disastrous addons CS worked on. You would think that the company behind CS could code cleanly and at an affordable rate, but this is not the case, instead we get copied/pasted thrown together sloppy and untested code littered with bugs that we have to pay hand over fist to fix - Sno