Complete Shipping / Order in Magento automatically
Magento is an Open source E-commerce web application. The Magento eCommerce Content Management System (CMS) is an excellent platform for building an online store. Magento provides excellent usability in many of its features including site design, layout and site structure. Different businesses have different demands. One advantage of using Magento e-Commerce is that it offers a wide range of integrated shipping methods. But Magento's core shipping functionality sometimes requires some additional features.
Magento being such a huge open source ecommerce web application, carries out a possibly every function that can be carried out on an ecommerce website. But suppose you have your own online store running well with full check-out requirement i.e invoice/shipping and completing all order at once then in that case it becomes tedious to manually create invoice and shipment. Thus, having your Magento store automatically shipping orders can be a great help and can make your workflow smooth.
Keeping this in mind, our talented Magento team set out to create a Auto Ship Track Extension, an automatic shipping module in Magento.
The intention behind making the extension i.e. AUTO SHIP TRACK is to make the working of shipment module automated. In order to carry out automatic shipping in Magento it is necessary to know the shipping methods that are used in Magento. The major shipping methods used in Magento are FedEx, UPS, USPS and DHL. Magento also supports flat shipping rates i.e. it collects an amount from the customer and carries out shipping manually. The shipment module in Magento is used in creating shipping in which it has a part to create shipping labels and creating invoices according to the shipments. The shipping labels are created in FedEx, UPS, USPS and DHL shipping method. These shipping labels have to be attached on the package which is created having the ordered products. There is also a facility to fetch tracking number of a particular shipment by calling the API of the shipping method selected.
This extension helps in removing the person's work to manually ship the orders one after another. AUTO SHIP TRACK extension has an inbuilt cron functionality which runs every 15 minutes, hence the need of the person to manually create the shipping is removed. The shipping is carried out automatically by AUTO SHIP TRACK extension. If the person has selected a shipping method at present FedEx and UPS then it will fetch the tracking numbers by calling their API's also. The extension will also create a shipping label in which the products that has been added in the order will be made into one package.
This extension will be great help in web stores where they have large numbers of orders being placed day in and out.
The AUTO SHIP TRACK extension is developed using similar architecture that Magento follows in the core system, following the coding standards that Magento supports. The need to carry out shipment automatically would increase when there are a large number of orders being placed at any point of time. It would be tiresome for a person to just get into an order and click on the "Ship" button. It would be resourceful if there was a way by which Magento would carry out shipment automatically, like rest of the processes which can be done automatically by one or the other extension. If an extension is made which can make the complete shipping method automated it would be of great use as it would reduce the work of a person in clicking on a button to carry out the shipment. So, that is what we have done by creating this Magento extension.
HOW OUR MAGENTO SHIPPING EXTENSION WORKS?
1) Overview
The AUTO SHIP TRACK extension works upon creating the complete shipment process automated. The shipment process includes creating a package, creating a shipping label and fetching the tracking number from the preferred shipping method. The intention behind creating this Magento extension is to make the complete shipping process automated by cron job.
2) The Work Flow
The AUTO SHIP TRACK extension carries out shipping as it is being created by default in Magento. Initially when the customer places an order by selecting the products, he selects from the shipping options provided there. Once he selects the shipping from the frontend and completes the process of checkout, its ordered is placed. Once the order is placed from the frontend, it is shown in the admin section where the admin will have to manually create the shipment and has to create an invoice and have to add tracking number if he wishes the shipment to be tracked.
3) Market Research
Today the market is being made online. There are web stores available for anything that one can ask for. There are a lot many sites which has a large number of products being sold online and there are huge number of people buying from these web store. This extension would be a great help to those web stores which has a large number of products being ordered at regular basis as it removes the burden of the person to manually ship the orders one after another. There are very few extensions available in the Magento Connect which focuses on tracking the shipments, but this AUTO SHIP TRACK extension is probably the only extension which carries out the shipment automatically.
4) Future Scope
This extension has a healthy future as there are a lot of people believing and buying from the online web stores. As the number of online customers increase the work of the admin would increase manifold, in order to reduce the work of the admin of just shipping the products this extension would be of a great help. The extension would be of a great help as it carries out the functionality automatically.
5) Future Enhancements
>> At present the extension supports only FedEx and UPS as the shipment method to create shipping labels and fetch tracking numbers. The extension would also include DHL and USPS in the shipment method list.
>> The present functionality does not include the creation of invoice which will also be added as an update.
>> We would also be providing the functionality to customize the cron timings from the admin section.
>> We would also give the users the option to carry out / not to carry out shipments automatically for the orders which do not have their shipping method from:- FedEx , UPS, DHL and USPS.
This Magento extension provides good advantage of Magento's object-oriented approach to provide a usability benefit which would help to boost conversion rates of your online business.
