Learning Claris FileMaker

In Part 3 of this series we’ll look into the options when you can’t use ESS and how you can still go about integrating your online shop with your FileMaker CRM.

 

Many of our (Databuzz) small business customers have both a physical presence and an online presence when it comes to selling their goods and services.

They  might have:

• a physical retail store where customers can come and purchase goods in person
• a mail order store where they take orders by mail, phone and fax and send the goods to the purchaser once they have paid
• an online store which takes orders, processes the credit card transactions and notifies the business to fulfil the orders
• a popup store/market store that runs every month or for short periods of time

When the business is starting up, or when they are adding a new method of selling goods and services, the tendency is for each of these stores to operate as their own silo.

This ultimately leads to a lot of data duplication/double entry in multiple systems as the business deals with orders coming in from multiple store presences.

Quite often we see the following workflow:

• physical and mail order/phone orders are processed in the central office FileMaker CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution
• online/eCommerce orders are processed via the online store attached to the customer’s website. The business is notified of new orders via email and these are then entered into the central office CRM system by customer service staff who then notify the accounts department to create an accounting entry in Xero or MYOB etc.

We wouldn’t generally recommend to customer’s that they use FileMaker to run their online eCommerce store, so there’s no problem with having the physical presence and the online presence separate (and it’s highly advisable from a security standpoint).

However this leads to the problem of scattered information and ad hoc processes – wouldn’t it be better if all the information was in one place and you could see all the physical orders and online orders from the central FileMaker CRM?

Could you save time and increase productivity by not having to manually re-enter all the online orders in both the main FileMaker CRM as well as your accounting software?

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In Part 2 we showed how you eliminate any double data entry by making your online store visible to your FileMaker solution by using the ESS (External SQL Data Sources) feature of FileMaker Pro/Server, allowing users to see online orders on a normal FileMaker layout.

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