I'm working on a site for a not very large shop that will also be selling online, mainly organic seeds but also some gardening tools etc. Most items are physically small and they usually ship them manually, although they do sometimes ship Express which can be tracked. The people who do the shipping may not have access to the website in the packaging area, so if they access the site it would likely be only once or twice a day.
They have three shipping rates (seeds only, seeds+other items, and Express), and I have shipping quotes working with these. I've customised the admin order template so that the people doing the packing will get an email listing all the details they need to send the items.
So I am wondering whether I need to use the Shipping module (not the Shipping Quote module which I do use)? I haven't found much documentation on it, but my understanding is that it records details of the order's fulfillment - packaging it up and sending it out. It doesn't seem to update the order status when a product is shipped and I can't find a Workflow-NG configuration that could be used to trigger that change when an item is shipped.
I don't want to add extra work for the people fulfilling the orders if it doesn't add much value. It seems to me in this case that the best approach would be to create an onscreen list of orders with status "paid for and pending to be shipped" or whatever status is appropriate, and allow the people doing the shipping to select the orders from the view that they've sent, and it would then do a mass update of the order statuses to "shipped" or "complete" or something. This could be a new screen or else a modification to the admin/store/orders screen.
I'm going to start looking into doing that, but am I missing something important here?
Thanks!