Using WooCommerce, you can start an online bookstore with relatively little effort. You can then have the Centraal Boekhuis in Culemborg handle your client-orders. If everything is set up properly, that bookstore can practically run itself: customers visit your webshop, they pay through your payment provider, orders are sent to CB, and CB ships the books to your customers.
In practice, every store still requires some work, including an online one. But with Hollands Spoor’s WooCB integration, you can get quite far.
WooCB links the stock and order system of WooCommerce to the Centraal Boekhuis order-fulfillment system. It works as follows:
Sending orders
When a visitor places an order in a WooCommerce webshop, WooCB processes that order immediately after payment. An order can contain more than one product, and not all ordered products are necessarily physical books that CB can fulfill, especially if you also sell other items. Therefore it selects only those order items that Centraal Boekhuis can fulfill. WooCB creates an order message for those items and sends it to CB. It sets the WooCommerce orderstatus to Processing, and it adds a note to the ordered titles indicating that CB will do the fulfillment.
Shortly afterward, CB sends a message back, a so-called .ONT message. It states that it received the order and that no formal issues prevent execution. In short, they indicate they will start processing it.
However, there cán be formal issues, for example if a customer postcode is unknown to CB. When WooCB receives such an ONT message, it immediately sets the order status to On hold. By now the order needs human intervention, because CB can not process the order without correction.
WooCommerce makes it possible to send an email to the customer when the order status changes. This means WooCB can inform the customer that CB has started processing the order.
Follow the order
Centraal Boekhuis then collects the ordered titles and ships them to the address WooCB included in the order message. Once shipping has succeeded, CB sends another message to the webshop, which WooCB retrieves: the so-called .UIT message. This allows WooCB to set the WooCommerce order status to Completed, and the webshop can send a cheerful email to the customer. WooCB also extracts the PostNL tracking code (or that of another carrier) from the UIT message; and optionally includes it in the customer email.
If something goes wrong while processing the order, CB also sends a message: the NUIT message may, for example, report that an ordered title is reprinted and therefore unavailable. Such a message sets the order status to On hold and leaves it to human intervention to determine whether the customer wants a refund or wants to wait for the title to become available again.
To help prevent unwanted NUIT messages, WooCB includes the option to synchronize CB stock levels with those of the webshop. WooCB can retrieve daily stock-level messages and use them to adjust the stock that WooCommerce relies on. This allows WooCommerce to avoid selling products that are sold out at CB.
Update your bookstore
To ensure the online bookstore offers an up-to-date catalog, WooCB can also optionally import ONIX messages that CB provides regularly. If those messages contain titles not yet present in the WooCommerce webshop, WooCB can optionally create those WooCommerce products automatically: WooCB uses title, author, summary, price, and cover image provided by the ONIX file to create a WooCommerce product. In this way, the store catalog stays automatically up to date.
When a book is no longer available, this is also reported in the ONIX file. In this way, WooCB can also use ONIX files to minimize the risk of failed orders.
WooCB also supports orders that include ebooks. WooCB handles ebooks as well, but in a different way: once the customer paid for an ebook, it retreives a link from eBoekhuis with which he or she can download the ebook. That link is sent to the customer immediately. WooCommerce sends these download links by default in the customer order confirmation email.
The full order flow across the payment provider, webshop, and Centraal Boekhuis is logged. These logs are available to the store manager as order notes on the WooCommerce order pages and ofcourse in more detail in the Woocommerce logging system
