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Delivery improvements

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Phillip Hullquist
  • Edited

Some of us run businesses that involve shipping or delivery of products (rentals in my case). There are a number of areas in which Checkfront could be improved to make these procedures far easier:

  • In the customer profile, it would be helpful to have more than a single address. I regularly need to use a different address as a delivery location while still keeping the same profile address as a billing address.
  • Bookings that require a staff member (such as a delivery/crew person) have no way to assign those staff to the booking or manage otherwise staff as a resource. This problem should be resolved with the forthcoming "Resource Management" functionality whenever that gets finished.
  • There's no way to add delivery/mileage/shipping charges without creating them as an inventory item. Using an inventory item for delivery is a clunky workaround and messes with the reports because it makes it appear I have far more "Items" booked than I actually do. For example, if I charge someone for 50 "delivery miles," the reports show an additional 50 items booked on that day. Ideally, I'd like to just add a custom shipping/delivery field that appears on the invoice after the subtotal.
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    Dedric Hourde
    • Edited

    Thanks Phillip Hullquist for taking the time to write this message.

    I'm in a similar situation, as I do long term rentals that I ship to my customers, and there is currently not easy way to work around the lack of appropriate functionality.

    • shipping address:

    I have created a Multi Choice Radio to offer a shipping address different than billing.

    with subsequent fields, only displayed when appropriate.

    It's an ugly workaround, not a solution!!!

    • Staff member as resource:

    I don't use this, so I won't comment

    • delivery/mileage charges:

    yes, again something missing here...

    I have various shipping prices, based on the country of delivery. I have had to create items, and make them "mandatory add-on" items to all my (real) products. But I still have to manually check the country selected match the delivery address… And as you explained, my reports are all skewed because delivery/shipping counts as an item

    a more streamlined system would be more than welcome.

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    Brittany

    Thanks for your posts, Phillip Hullquist and Dedric Hourde!

    Official functionality to support delivery fees was a feature request reviewed by our Product team recently. While we do hope to address these pain points in the future it would be a large scale project requiring extensive research. 

    We welcome any additional operator insight here on this thread so that we can continuously update the feature request with feedback. If and when we get to the point of starting this project we will definitely keep you both in mind.

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    Phillip Hullquist
    • Edited

    The addition of delivery/shipping charges doesn't need to be complicated or large scale. While it would be ideal to have delivery/shipping fees automatically calculated, I would be happy with just a basic price field where I can type in the fee and have it added after the sub-total.

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    Brittany

    Thanks for clarifying your specific needs, Phillip Hullquist.

    You'd expect this value to impact the grand total, correct? And it sounds like you are manually reviewing each booking to apply the appropriate charge - could you please confirm if I am understanding correctly?

    While we'd prefer to resolve the greater issue - having a feature intended for delivery charges so that it can resolve cases like yours as well as other operator needs, I think it's valuable for us to capture that there are smaller improvements that you would find helpful.

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    Phillip Hullquist
    • Edited

    Yes, I currently calculate everything manually and add them to the invoice using a Inventory Item named Delivery Charge. At the simplest implementation level, I would envision an improvement to this method functioning something like this:

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    Brittany

    Thank you for the mockup - I will pass this suggestion along. 🙂  Have a great weekend!

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    Dedric Hourde

    ideally, a "proper" delivery function would be what we all want. (so it can be set to calculate accurately delivery/shipping charges).

    But in the meantime, I guess a "simple" charge field would be a helpful first step.

    A possibly option that may suit the most of us would be the ability to force a mandatory item to every booking. In fact, this feature should be available, independently of the delivery feature.

    This could allow to add a processing fee for instance.

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    Chase O'Briant

    I run a recreation equipment rental business, and my tactic has been to put on the booking page as well as confirmation emails "If you requested delivery for your items your order will be subject to a delivery fee" and each order is manually reviewed by staff and the fee added as an inventory item after the initial booking.  It works, but is extra work for my staff and seems like something CF should add in the future.  My specific issue is that I offer free delivery if customers meet a specific price threshold, so if delivery fees are added to the booking engine I'd want a way to automatically differentiate between free delivery orders and delivery fee orders.

    Needless to say not every customer reads, and sometimes the fees come as a "surprise" to them.  If it can be factored in at the time of booking that would be ideal.

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    Phillip Hullquist

    Since Checkfront doesn't support a "Book Now, Pay Later" order flow, the need for the delivery fee functionality is even more important. I enabled online payments last year and now my customers pay once upon booking, and then are forced to pay the delivery fees later in a separate transaction.

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    Demo PDStaff

    I'm sure most businesses here will see a massive benefit having a feature that allows for mandatory fees.

    This could be use for basic delivery fee (until a proper system is in place, that can integrate actual calculation of shipping cost), a booking fee, or anything that a business needs to automatically add to all bookings.

    Since there are many possible use for mandatory fees, please don't restrict to 1 mandatory fee per booking...

     

    As for shipping/delivery,  I would be very happy with the possibility to add the relevant fee based on country of delivery….

     

    I guess it has become obvious that this feature is needed (and expected!) by many of us...

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    Scott Aspenberg

    I'm currently trialing Checkfront. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any way to include additional charges such as freight to a rental. This might be a deal breaker for me.

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    Phillip Hullquist
    • Edited

    @Scott Aspenberg I've been asking for improvements to allow for delivery calculations since September 2015. The standard response has always been "great idea, but we have no plans to fix it."

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    Dedric Hourde

    yep, still waiting.....

    And the worst part is not so much that the feature is still not available, but that they don't even consider it...

    And since it is the same with so many feature requests, it really feels like they don't [care to] listen to their customers.

     

    Scott Aspenberg that's the beauty of a trial. you are not committed yet.
    My advice: if CheckFront feels all your needs AS IT IS now, then go for it. It's a solid system that rarely fails.

    But if you are missing anything, or hope they'll bring that special feature you need (even a basic one), then you should probably have a look thought this forum to get a feeling of what you can and can't expect....

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