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:
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, only those order items that can physically be fulfilled by Centraal Boekhuis are selected. An order message is created for those items and sent to CB. The WooCommerce order status is set to Processing, and the ordered titles receive a note indicating that their order has been sent to CB.
Shortly afterward, CB sends a message back, a so-called .ONT message, stating that the order has been received and that there are no formal issues preventing execution. In short, they indicate they will start processing it.
However, there can also be formal issues, for example if a customer postcode is unknown to CB. When such an ONT message is received, WooCB immediately sets the order status to On hold. Human intervention is then required, because CB will not process the order until it has been corrected.
WooCommerce makes it possible to send an email to the customer when the order status changes. This means the customer can also be informed that CB has started processing 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 the WooCommerce order status to be set 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; it can be included in the customer email.
If something goes wrong while processing the order, CB also sends a message: the NUIT message, for example, may report that an ordered title is being reprinted and is 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.
To ensure the online bookstore offers an up-to-date catalog, WooCB can also optionally import ONYX 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: title, author, summary, price, and cover image are taken from the ONYX file and used 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 ONYX file. In this way, WooCB can also use ONYX files to minimize the risk of failed orders.
WooCB also supports orders that include ebooks. These are handled by WooCB as well, but in a different way: once the ebooks are paid for, a link can be retrieved from eBoekhuis so the customer can download the ebook. That link can be 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
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