Before we start with the tutorial, I would like to first start with outlining the nature of the business challenge in integrating customers from your shopping cart to MYOB.

The Challenges

In an online business, customers purchase the goods or service via the online store. After the order is successfully processed, an email is sent to the merchant with the customer information and the order details.

Challenge #1: New Customers can order directly from the website without pre-screening

This challenge is applicable to most online retail stores that target consumers. In general terms most of new customers will originate from the website and often have no prior relationship with the business. They are likely to visit the website again to place another order in the future.

The challenge is to sync this information to MYOB and maintain a reference of the new MYOB customer card for future orders for this new customer.

(This challenge is the focus of this blog post.)

Challenge #2:  Customers have to establish a trading account prior to them placing online orders

Some merchants pre-qualify their customers before they accept their online orders. This is especially true for suppliers and distributers. Usually, suppliers or distributers will have an account creation process that will create the customer card in MYOB prior the customer placing their order.

The challenge is to associate and existing MYOB customer card to a customer record in the shopping cart, thus creating a reference between the two systems.

(This challenge is outside the scope of this tutorial. We will cover this challenge in future posts)

There are many reasons and benefits on why you would maintain references to customer records. Some of these benefits are:

• Detect any changes in the customer information, like shipping address or phone numbers and easily update MYOB records with the modified information.
• Manage and maintain multiple shopping carts into one MYOB company file.
• Sync orders automatically to MYOB without the need to specify the customer card every time.
• Reporting and business analysis. Having this information allows you to see customers buying habits with the ability to see who are your best customers.
• Integrate to 3^rd party software like CRM and newsletter systems.

Solution: Adding a new customer in MYOB and creating a reference record in Cart Connect.

This operation starts with an order from a new customer. In the sales module, orders [Active] tab shows all non-synced orders. A new customer order is highlighted with red square box around the customer icon.

Opening the record will show the content of the order and all information about the new customer.

Under the action menu, there is an menu item called “Add Customer to MYOB”

This action will perform the operation of creating a new MYOB customer card, prefilled with customer details from the shopping cart. It will also create a new Cart Connect customer reference record and associate it automatically with that customer from the shopping cart.

Once you have completed this operation, the customer is now exists in both MYOB and Cart Connect and you can start the sync operation to MYOB.

I hope this tutorial shown how simple and easy to add new customers to MYOB.

If you need any more information or would like a private webinar, do not hesitate to contact us.

Cart Connect is a hosted SaaS solution, that is architected to store product information in a secured centralised data store. Information stored includes documents, images and detailed information about the product. This ability to centralise the storage of information in the cloud, gives the flexibility to authorised users, access to this information outside the physical boundaries of the business and regardless of their geographical location.

There are many benefits that could add value to your business:

• Communicate information quickly and accurately between staff members.
  Since the product information is stored centrally, any changes made to the product such as prices or new photographs being added are reflected across the system instantly. This ability to quickly update information will ensure correct information is communicated to your customers with minimum efforts and errors.
• Keep other systems updated.
  The core integration features to your shopping carts and MYOB accounting, means that any changes can easily be reflected in these systems with a click of a button.
• Multiple warehouses and distribution centres.
  Keep track of inventory levels across many warehouses, thus giving you a complete picture of how much stock you have across the business.
• Extend the platform to your needs.
  The ability to extend the system to your requirement means that we have the flexibility to develop add-on modules specific to your business operation. An example is the ability to create a custom stock level watch and notification service to keep monitoring stock level changes.
  

Above are a few examples of how Cart Connect can provide positive benefits to your business. By providing integration between different systems like MYOB accounting, shopping carts and having centralised information empowers your staff to be more efficient and effective.

If you have any questions on how Cart Connect can unlock the power of communication within your business, please feel free to contact us for further discussion.

After setting up Cart Connect with your MYOB package there are a couple of ways to create customers in Cart Connect, in this post I will be showing you how to import those customers you already have in MYOB.

But why do I need to create another customer in Cart Connect, isn’t enough that they exist at the cart and MYOB level?

The answer: Basically, by doing so we are able to better marry them between the different environments.  Example may be a business who accepts online orders and enters them as a generic customer account in MYOB.  Using Cart Connect they can simply associate them together.  Another reason could be a business that manages multiple shopping carts.  If this customer purchases from both sites, you are able to link that to an existing Cart Connect Customer and it will then automatically be associated with MYOB (this assumes that this customer already is associated to MYOB).

So lets get into importing Customer Cards from MYOB.

Once you run up Cart Connect enter the CRM Module and by default the Customers Tab is selected, if not, go ahead and select Customers.

Here we can see there are no customers currently in our CRM area.

To import existing customers we now click on the “Import Customers” button.  This will open and read all existing customers live out of your MYOB company file and display the following screen (please not we are using the Clearwater company file, so the customers you see on your list will look different).

You can select individual items, all items and optionally import the same customers in again creating duplicate customers (as shown in images below).

Once imported, you will now see those that have successfully imported.  Customers that are added to the Cart Connect application this way are automatically associated with MYOB.  When these customers next purchase from your shopping cart, all you need to do now is simply link them to the customer in Cart Connect.  Any subsequent purchases from that customer doesn’t require you match them as it has already been done once before.

That’s it.  A simple way to import existing MYOB customer details into Cart Connect.

So here are some benefits of importing these customers from MYOB:

• Imported customers are already associated with the MYOB equivalent card.
• Have the ability to pick which customers to import.
• Customers are already in the Cart Connect system, so when they purchase from your shopping cart, you don’t need to add them into MYOB.
• You can now manage the same customer across multiple shopping carts with accuracy.

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop us a line using our contact page and we’ll get back to you.

We would like all those partners who joined in to assist the development of Cart Connect.  We are grateful for all your feedback throughout the process of development.  Over the next few months and well into the future, we will again be requesting feedback from our users on how to further enhance the application to meet businesses needs.

We are very excited about the future and how Cart Connect will assist businesses.