Commerce SOS

An order management system for Drupal Commerce 1.x

The Commerce Simple Order System (SOS) is a system that lets you place and manage orders through a simple UI. Drupal Commerce is powerful, flexible, complex and super awesome!

However, the admin interface for creating and managing orders is challenging for a typical user and lacks simplicity. Ease-of-use was the primary goal when we designed the SOS interface. From creating a customer to making the final order payment, Commerce SOS has you covered.

A better order management UI

As the saying goes, innovation comes from necessity. And this simplicity was a necessity for one of our valuable clients who echoed the same sentiments; the order admin interface really needed a face lift. The current process of placing and managing orders was a bit frustrating and took a lot of effort.

There were many cases where customers were forced to call in and place phone orders because of issues they had while placing them online. This was challenging right off the bat as the first thing our client had to do was find the cart of the customer. Most customers have no idea what their order ID is and it often took time and effort to locate it from the huge list of orders. Once they did locate it, the process got even more complicated. Is the customer a new user or an existing customer? Could the admin find them in the system if they were an existing customer? If not, they’d be creating another duplicate account for the same person.

Then there is the issue of making changes to the order, whether it was adding or removing products, applying discounts or shipping information. The whole process was simply too cumbersome. They wanted to cut down on the complexity and save their employees time and effort administering orders.

So, we put our heads together and came up with an admin ordering system that allowed them to do everything the current ordering system did, but in a simple and straightforward manner. Let’s take a look at what Commerce SOS has to offer.

Order ID visible to the customer

Imagine the same scenario where a customer calls your store and asks you to place an order for them. They might have already created a cart and the first thing you need to do is find the order. When Commerce SOS is enabled, the first thing the module does is add a header to the cart and checkout pages that displays the Order ID in big bold text. The customer will never have trouble finding it when you ask them what their cart ID is.