Choose Products to duplicate

Hi Tambe,

Ah that is definately a worthy consideration. Out of interest what bits do they want to duplicate and exclude? And how do you see splitting out an order working?

I have an idea for exclusion of pre selecting in a settings area to duplicate billing/shipping/product data and whichever is ticked will be duplicated.

Splitting an order not quite sure how you see this working or an idea on how you see it working?

Your feedback would be great here so I can look at advancing this plugin.

Cheers
J

Hi Jamie,
I built a WooCommerce store for my client, who sells wholesale dog products. She reps about a dozen different lines of products and sells them to retail stores. When the stores place an order, they might order something like this:

Order#12345
Product A 2qty (Vendor A)
Product B 10qty (Vendor A)
Product C 12qty (Vendor B)
Product D 8qty (Vendor B)
Product E 2qty (Vendor C)
Product F 2qty (Vendor C)

Now she has this order, but has to forward the orders to each individual vendor for shipping/payment. I showed her how to export a CSV file, but that adds a number of steps, and involves chopping up a CSV file and saving separate CSV files to then email. It’s more time and added difficulty. And this example order is small. Her order could be for 10 vendors and 40 different products.

I would love a solution that just allowed her to email a version of the order confirmation email that WooCommerce sends. That email is formatted nicely and lists all of the necessary info. There’s no way that I’ve found to email only part of the order, so the hack I was thinking of was to receive order# 12345 and select certain items to split off into a new, separate order. That way she could track them separately, email notifications separately, etc.

It seems that this must be a common issue, where stores need to communicate with many vendors to fill orders. If you have any other idea of what would work I’d appreciate the input. I found plugins involving split shipping from various vendors, but they don;t solve my problem.

Thanks!
Tony

Hi Tony,

Sorry for the delay I have been a long project! Hmm I see the issue not sure if actually duplicating the order several times might be more time consuming and confusing in the future. Let me have a think on it as I may look at if it is possible within the order to select items and duplicate with selected items only.

I am just not sure if it would be more confusing especially if someone duplicates it 20x and has to go fishing through all the new orders to fire off emails and ideally they would want differentiating from other orders as they are technically ‘sister’ orders, as one order could end up taking up a full page of orders which does not seem easier or more manageable to me.

Ideally an email plugin would be better that would allow you to select products in the order and fire an order email too a specified email address, then record this in the Notes area. I think this would be way more efficient cleaner and easier to manage don’t you think?

Cheers
Jamie

Hi Jamie,
Yes, I agree it’s not the best solution. Your idea about the emails is good, and something I thought of, but the reason I thought about splitting the order up is that it gives the administrator the ability to handle each order separately. (in case of separate shipping info, billing info, etc.) You’re totally right though that it’s not a simple solution.

Tony

Hi Tony,

Yes certainly a good one to think about thats for sure and I don’t like to be beat either.

So if billing/shipping was to change then technically the only thing to duplicate would be certain products? Or would you select to duplicate the billing/shipping if needed?

I am just trying to foresee what is ultimately needed for the barebones. As I could look into on the order page selecting billing/shipping and then items you want to duplicate with a new Duplicate order button on in the order sidebar. This would then create the new sister order with selected info and hook into the Woocommerce order table to add in a new row highlighting the main order so it is easily identifiable from the main orders page. Then they can generate the usual Woocommerce order emails from the order using Woocommerces functionality.

Something to think of but one way I could see it working in BETA to begin with not sure how useful it would be. As is it easier to duplicate the existing order and as its duplicated now on-hold is it easer to just remove details you don’t need anyway?

Cheers
J

I guess the absolute easiest thing form a user perspective, would be to allow the admin to email a portion of the order to whomever they want. The email that gets sent to the customer for confirmation is simple and clear, and formatted with a nice HTML table. Somehow generating a similar email based on only selected products, either manually chosen, or by choosing a category, would be great. I wonder what other store owners do in this situation?

I’ve just gotten into WordPress over the last few months, so I don’t know a lot about the nuances of writing plugins for it. My background is in HTML/CSS/JS and Rails.

Hi Tony,

If you have a good understanding of PHP then it is just a case of learning all the hooks/filter that WP and other plugins use.

I have had a bit of a research tonight and I have an idea on how it could work. Underneath we can create a new metabox that displays all the products for the order with checkboxes and underneath a subject input and recipient input. Upon submitting we hook into Woocommerces email class so it has the exact same layout/style and just replace the item table with the selected items and it is emailed to the specified recipient with a custom subject. Upon successful submission it is then record underneath the meta box saying who it was delivered to and what items were emailed kind of like a log to look back on in the future so you can see 10x emails and what data was sent to who. I think this could be a good way of building this and would be useful to other users too.

Whats your thoughts on this?

Cheers
J

That sounds pretty good. I haven’t seen any other plugins out there like that, so you could maybe make some money off of it! I assume there is some need out there.

Hi Tony,

OK sounds like a plan I may make this my next project, would you be interested in BETA testing it when I get round too it? If so fire me an email patchgill[at]hotmail.co.uk and I will be glad to discuss finer details when I have something put together.

Cheers
J