Taking a Phone Order in Volusion

Volusion has a handy Phone Orders page, one that allows a person with back-office access to take an order over the phone and enter it into the system.

A great idea.

Yet, in true Volusion fashion, it is riddled with problems.

For instance, if you have to manually enter a product into the field, you need the product code, as you can't search by the product name field.

Fine.  That's not too much of a problem.  However, once you find and enter the product code, it does pre-populate the Product Name field, but it doesn't pre-populate the price or shipping weight fields. So, you have to go look up the price and weight for each item. You can uncheck the "Tax" and "Free Shipping" checkboxes should you so desire.

Then, once you enter the quantity and click the "Add" button to add it to the order, the previously un-checked Tax and Free Shipping boxes are checked again, so you have to remember to go back and un-check them once more. Additionally, about 25% of the time (in my experience), the price or quantity will change without notice.

OK, so you get all of that done, and all of the products are entered successfully, with the correct price (which takes time, all of which makes you look unprofessional on the phone to your customer, but that's not important, is it?), so you move on to taking down the customer's billing and shipping info. Pretty hard to screw that up, even for Volusion engineers.

Next, click on the "Apply Tax + Shipping" button, and go back up top to the shipping area where you can choose the shipping option, before going back down to the bottom of the screen and taking the customer's payment info.

Finally, hit the "Place Order" button at the bottom of the screen, and the order should go through, right? 

Well, that all depends on how fast you can count Rosary beads.

I've seen orders crash (with the ubiquitous Reference #000000 error) for a myriad of reasons:

• There was a problem with the email address not matching (or matching) an account (Thankfully, this problem does appear to be improving with time)
• There was some problem with a Product/Product Code in the order
• There was some inexplicable problem with the format of the order comments
• Or my favorite: you started the order, the customer encountered a problem with their credit card so they had to call you back with the correct credit card, so you left the browser window open and the order inexplicably timed out with no warning, and you had to start the whole G-D order over again.

Thanks, Volusion.