The Edit Order Details screen in SPI's shopping cart, allows you to:

* Update customer shipping address
* Update payment details
* Cancel / Uncancel an order
* Set a custom price
* Charge customer's credit card
* Set an order as free
* Control a recurring product next-charge-date

The really cool thing is that you can do all that from within a single screen. Here's how it works:

Step 1: Access Customer Manager

Login to your SPI account account and click on the Customer Manager. Search for the customer whose order you wish to edit and click on the customer name.

Don't have an SPI account yet? Signup here

Step 2: Select Order to edit

Scroll down and click on the order you wish to edit, under the orders tab.



Step 3: Edit Order details

Update the customer's shipping address, product ordered or set a custom price for this individual order.

If you'd like to provide the customer a free week or two on a recurring product order, update the next-charge-date with a future date.



Step 4: Update Payment Information

Click on Payment Method to switch between 'Credit Card', 'PayPal' or 'Direct Payment'.

If the customer is paying with a credit card, you can select to use an existing card on file or manually enter a new card if you're taking an order over the phone.



Step 5: Process a charge

The 'Process Charge' button lets you charge the selected credit card for a specific amount.



By default the amount shown will be the amount currently due for this order, however you can change that and charge a different amount, thereby giving your customer a discount or charging a premium on the current amount due.

Over the next few days, we are planning a release of a new version of the SoftwareProjects front-end.

What's changing?

Rebranding as SPI

While we'll always be SoftwareProjects.com, most clients refer to our company as SPI and we like it. So we've decided to adopt that name internally as well.

A more corporate look & feel

We know you love the old light-weight design. The new design is still pretty light, but makes it easier to find your away around the ~ 1,500 pages of our site.

More video

Everyone loves video!

We'll be adding videos with SPI executives as well as customer testimonials and a new SPI Marketing Strategies video of the week.

Templates

With the introduction of the new site, we're also adding a new feature - MyAccount Page templates. Don't like the new look? You can now pick your preferred template for every page of your SPI dashboard.

New Dashboard Charts

Lots of new charts to place on your SPI executive dashboard, showing stats about sales, traffic and email campaigns.

New homepage

Think functionality.

Industry RSS feeds, Internet Marketing research tools and other services, will all be available from the new SPI homepage.

We're proud to announce a major step forward in how service boxes are presented on the dashboard page.

Instead of the standard one-size-fit-all boxes, SPI users can now arrange services in different layouts that help to break up the page.

Changing the layout to emphasize more important services, helps keeping the important information clearly visible. Just because information is coming from different sources doesn't mean that it cannot benefit from a well designed layout.

Layouts are made of 1 to 4 boxes where you can stack widgets. We also improved the way you drag'n'drop widget to reorganize your page.

To change the layout of a page, scroll down and click on 'Page Layout'. Click on a layout image and the service boxes will re-arrange accordingly.

With 2008 behind us, we can look back and reflect at what a wonderful year it has been for us here at SoftwareProjects:

Traffic and usage of the SPI Platform continued to increase



We Attended Some Great Events

Gave away SPI goodies, met with existing clients & partners and connected with new people.



Took over the Information Marketing industry by storm

61 of the world's most renowned online marketers, ditched their old systems and switched to SPI.



Expanded our Financial Client Base into Europe



Generated $12M in 8 days for our customers

This year the SPI team orchestrated 5 multi-million dollar product launches, that generated a total of $12M in 8 days.

A typical product launch on the SPI dashboard follows this pattern -



Continued investing in People

While the economy took a dive, SPI has been recruiting new people and giving out raises like it's 1999.

Our people will always remain the company's most precious asset.

-=-

Plans for 2009

* Continue breaking revenue records
* Rebrand as SPI
* Attend & Speak at more events
* Weekly Newsletter
* Continue recruiting the brightest minds
* Feature more video on our website
* Make our homepage useful (when you're not logged in)
* Launch the "SPI Elite" club
* Make our tools more intuitive
* Get closer to our customers

When an order is logged in the SPI shopping cart system, it is tracked on three levels - as an Order, two financial Transactions and a cash Register entry.

When you click on a customer from your Customer Manager module, you can scroll down and click on the tabs at the bottom of the screen, to access the customer orders, transactions and register entries.



As part of this post, I will explain what each stands for and how you can customize the display to your liking.

Definitions

Orders: All orders placed by the customer on your website. An order can contain one or more product items.

Transactions: A running balance sheet, showing credits (payments received) and debits (charges for products & services) posted to a customer's account. The system maintains a running balance for every one of your customers.

Register: The cash register, showing a single entry per every payment received.

Example

To help you understand how orders, transactions and register entries work, let's use an example.

For the purpose of our example, we're going to look at John Camfield, from Mississippi. John placed a single order for the "Nite Trim" product, on November 4th, 2008.

The "Nite Trim" product costs $4.99 to try out, followed by a $39.00 charge on day #15 and then $39.00 recurring charges every 30 days.

Clicking on the Orders tab, shows the single order placed by John on November 4th, 2008.



If we click on the Register tab, we can see an entry per every time the customer was charged.



There's the initial $4.99 charge on November 4th, followed by $39.00 charged on day 15 and then the first monthly recurring charge of $39.00 on December 5.

And finally, clicking on the Transactions tab, shows all credits and debits posted to the customer account.



Every order typically maps to two transactions - a credit showing the payment received, immediately followed by a debit for the order total.

The transactions tab is useful when you allow customers to establish a credit line and accrue an outstanding balance with your company or when you manually add money to a customer's account so that they can place orders without having to pay.

Customization

SPI allows you to customize the tabs you see when clicking on a customer record.

You can control which tabs are displayed and the order of display.

To do so, click on 'Settings' under the Customer Manager module and select which tabs to display.



Note:

For those of you familiar with 1ShoppingCart, if you don't plan on offering your customers the ability to establish a credit line with your company and accrue an outstanding balance, you may want to completely hide the 'Transactions' tab and focus on the 'Register' tab.

The 'Register' tab mimics the same functionality offered by other systems that don't keep track of a customer-level balance sheet.

When using the Software Projects shopping cart, your customers are provided with a customer's back office system, where customers can login to:

Access electronic products

View order information

Access a private member's only community (forum / blog)

Submit support tickets and

Update payment details.

The SPI system offers two ways to block customer access to the back office.

1. Change customer status to 'Inactive' - to block all access

Every customer has a 'status' flag which can be either: Active, Inactive, Abandoned or Testing.

To update customer status, open the Customer Manager, locate the customer you would like to update, click on the customer name and change the status field:



Setting a customer status to 'Inactive' will block all access to the customer's back office. This is the quickest way to disable all access.

Upon attempting to login, the customer will be presented with a message like this one:



Important: When an inactive customer visits your main site and places a new order, their status will automatically change back to 'Active'.

2. Cancel orders - to block access to individual products and services

Upon successful login to the customer's back office, your customers will typically be presented with a list of products / services they can access, based on their order history:



You can control whether canceled orders are not included on the list of "Your products" or listed with no link.

To cancel a customer order, open the Customer Manager, locate the customer, click on the customer name and then click on the Cancel / Refund button next to the order you wish to cancel:



All changes take effect immediately.

If you're offering subscription-type products (with recurring payments), you are probably going to want to automatically cancel an order and block access, when charges to the customer's credit card are declined.

To set this up, open the Order Manager and click on Settings.

Set the number of days of unpaid balance when you'd like an order to be automatically canceled:



For example, setting this to 3 days, would cause the system to automatically cancel all recurring orders where charges have been declined 3 days ago. The system will attempt to charge a credit card up to 3 times, once per day. If the card declines 3 times and no alternative form of payment is provided, the customer order will be canceled and access to the designated product / service blocked.