Now that we have products, configured e-mails, payments, and shipping and had a closer look at our store's appearance, it's time to start doing some real sales! But what happens once we do? How do we keep track of our orders, deliveries, and invoices after that? This chapter describes exactly those processes.
In this chapter, you will learn:
- Working with Sales Orders in the Magento frontend to test drive your sales process
- Working with sales orders, invoices, and shipments
- Creating a sales order directly in the Magento backend
- What Magento can and cannot do when you have to handle returns and credit memos
- What you need to do if you need integration with other software solutions
So far in the previous chapters we've spent lots and lots of time in the Magento backend. Except for the chapter about themes, you've hardly spent any time in looking at what your customers will see in the frontend. And that isn't good, because the end result of your work is of course why you're taking all the steps from the earlier chapters.
Since we have already taken a lot of steps to prepare ourselves it's time to have a closer look at what your customers will see when they are visiting your store. Of course the look and feel of your web shop highly depends on the theme you've chosen. To keep everything as standardized as possible, we'll be using the default Magento theme throughout this chapter. And we're using the sample data available to decently fill the store. Let's do some sales orders!
- We're assuming here that this won't be your first time ever in buying something from an online store. So you'll know what such a process generally looks like. Even though a lot of the steps we'll take here will be pretty obvious for you, we'll still show them just to make you aware of all the Magento-specific things that will be visible. It's good to have a closer look at this process and be aware of what is happening exactly. Remember that everything that we did so far in the Magento backend will have its consequences in the frontend for your customers.