Ubercart

This seems like a common problem for any retail operation.
Being able to manually create an order and only require the client to login and enter payment would be a real time saver in many situations.

Is someone working on this already?
Perhaps a solution exists that I'm not aware of?

Thanks,

The work around sounds interesting, using a token with email, but it does not "preload" the order persay, it depends upon user log in, but yes it sounds very clever..

As to this feature that, btw was in drupal e-commerce which they called invoicing and used "add transaction, As afore mentioned...

...after some searching I realize how insanely useful this would be. Basically just create the order and allow them to login and pay for it using credit card or paypal....

Any chance the next version of Ubercart for Drupal 6 or 7 could have hooks for this?

I've been thinking about this quite a bit too, but need more minds to iron out the details.

Here's my vision:
A. Admin creates an order using the normal admin order creation process, but not filling in addresses or payment method, and when the order is saved, an invoice is sent to the customer.
B. The invoice details what is due, and has a message telling the customer where to login and pay their bill, and when it is due.
C. Customer logs in and goes to a tab like the user order history tab (or even on the same tab, in a separate table above the order history). This table displays any bills that the customer has, along with a link to "Pay now".
D. Customer clicks the "Pay now" link, and their cart (if any) is cleared and reloaded with the 'product(s)' on the order, the session variable is set to the order id, and they're sent to checkout.
E. Customer checks out and pays normally. From this point on, everything is normal.
F. Admin will probably need another report regarding bills, their due date, and their status (paid, partially paid, overdue, not yet due)

Potential Problems:
A. There would need to be a way to mark an order as a bill rather than a normal order. Order status could be used for this, but that's messy since then you have one field serving two purposes. So there should probably be an order_type field.
B. Also, for billing, it's almost certain that many use cases will need a 'date due' field. And they may need another status indicator specific to bills that takes due date and/or partial payments into account. For ease of reporting, I think any new fields should get their own table related by order_id rather than being stuffed into $order->data.
C. Should have a separate invoice template for bills, since they won't usually have billing info and payment method, and will have different text/messaging than regular orders.
D. Clearing the cart to go to checkout should probably either have a confirmation (if there's anything in the cart) or restore the cart after checkout completed.
E. Variable/partial payments will probably be a common use case (ex: customer can only pay $20 towards the $40 due right now). Ordinarily, variable prices are done when adding an item to the cart, and the price entered is the one that goes on the order. But in this case, the order is created first and you wouldn't really want to change the amount due, so some other approach would be needed to allow the customer to pay less than the total due. When checking out with a 'bill' type order, the customer should have a pane to enter the amount that they're paying. (This should probably be an option, since some admins may not want to allow partial payment.)

Additional use cases/features that would probably be wanted:
A. In some uses, a customer could reasonably have multiple bills for different things, due on different dates, of different amounts. May be nice to have a way to show 'total due' (or 'total outstanding', including bills not yet due) and a way for them to pay multiple bills at once, as well as a way for admins to see such summary info.
B. Admins will want a way to see which customers pay regularly and which don't.
C. Admins may want some trigger to occur when a bill is overdue, or a customers total due exceeds a certain amount. (Certainly a periodic 'your bill is overdue' email, probably with configurable scheduling.)
D. Some admins may want the ability to 'roll forward' a bill, canceling the old one and adding it's amount to the new one (possibly with a late charge) rather than having multiple bills outstanding. They would prefer this to be either automated or a one-click process, rather than manual.

I think that would be quite useful, although a bit complicated to build. Curious to know what others think. As a businessperson, what would your must-have features be?

subscribing

Just keeping the conversation alive...

How about when a person logs in their session shopping cart is loaded by hook_user
from a table that the admin put orders into for that...

The wish list module uses that hook in a sort of the opposite way... it takes current session products
and puts them into a table, we would want to do the reverse...
excerpt from uc_wishlist

/**
* Implementation of hook_user().
*
* When a user logs in, any products on the wish list associated with the
* current session are moved to the newly authenticated user's wish list
* (or if that does not exist, the anonymous wish list is assigned as the
* user's wish list).
*
* Also, provide a link to the user's wish list from the user's profile page.
*/
/

but note it appears that the uc_wishlist modules puts stuff from the wishlist into cart by having the human
select it... not directly in a function
so no cut paster from here...

so whish list is not going to be the way to force items from a table into the cart,
but it does give an example of having tables with product items and running beside
the ubercart modules to modify pages about wishlist stuff... so it is still a good module to look
at to get an understanding of possibilities...

I am in need of the exact bill-pay type features that have been discussed on this thread for months. Has anyone actually started developing a module for this idea? If not, then I am going to start coding...

hi!

i've compiled a possible solution, i think is great but i'm not able to make it work.

Please see: http://www.ubercart.org/comment/52552

any help will be wellcome! =)

Hi All,

I've been using the Masquerade module to put items in users' carts for them. Perhaps that is a solution for some of you.

Regards,
Jeff

subscribing..!

masquerade would be okay if you have their credit card,
but if you put things in the cart as them.
does the order preserve so when they log in a week later they could pay instead?

Also I would think they could delete the item from cart.