Homepage >> Help >> Selling >> After Sales Tools

New tools are currently being developed to streamline the process for sellers to manage orders placed on Bob Shop. While the tools are still in development, the intention is for these new tools to replace the existing interface and to provide sellers with one set of tools to manage all their sales through one web based interface.

The reason we are providing access to the new tools before they have been fully developed is to get feedback from sellers, which we hope will guide the direction for development moving forward. Currently you need to be aware of the following limitations:

• The tools are currently only working for Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.6.
• The new tools are based on the concept that in future every purchase (including all won bids) will automatically be placed into an order by the system regardless whether the buyer completes an order or not. This is currently not the case, which means that won bids from auctions where the buyer has not yet completed an order will not appear in the new interface yet.

The main overriding concept for the new tools is that as a seller you can manage all your orders by setting your own custom individual status on each order (this is done by clicking on the status box to the left of each order in the new interface). You can then filter on order status and other criteria to easily display only the orders you want to deal with. By default there are 6 colour coded order statuses labelled "set status", "Pending A", "Pending B", "Pending C", Pending D" and "Completed". Sellers are able to customise the 4 pending statuses setting their own labels.

The interface also allows for the adding of multiple custom private (visible only by the seller) or public (also visible by the buyer) notes to each order where the public notes will be emailed to the buyer. The public notes can be used to send a tracking number to the buyer. The tracking number together with a time stamp will be recorded on the order thereby preventing any possible future disputes with regards to when the tracking number was sent. The new interface allows for the printing of shipping labels and invoices / packaging slips / item lists. There is also a spreadsheet view of all orders under the advanced search option.

Considering we have found that most problems between buyers and sellers tend to arise due to miscommunication in one form or another (including buyers not receiving emails from sellers due to spam or some other reason), the intention of the new tools is to provide a single interface for sellers to manage all their orders and for buyers to be kept informed of the status of their orders through the Bob Shop system. This, for example, will ensure that there are no disputes such as when the seller sent the buyer the tracking number for their particular order, as this information would be recorded with a time stamp on the Bob Shop system.

Feel free to play around with the new tools and provide us your feedback on the forum.