Can anyone please give us some direction on a straightforward way to take an order over the phone? Many of our customers call us with questions, then want to place the order over the phone.
Having an admin the ability to enter and process a new, unregistered customer’s order seems like a core and basic functionality of any web store solution, however, in nopCommerce this seems to be a great challenge.
We have "checkout as Guest" available, so we have tried to log out of the system, then input the customer’s order information and use the "checkout as Guest" option. This seems to work, however, every subsequent customer that calls in after that gets added to the same "guest" customer, and all the phone orders and addresses all become assigned to the same "Guest" customer. This gives the appearance in the system that one guest customer placed many orders, each under a different address. This also completely destroys the value of any reports and metrics that can be gathered from the system. This is also a painful process as we need to log in and out of admin all the time to do this.
Is there a better way to accomplish this or are there plans the make enhancements in the future to allow taking phone orders? Currently, I could not find any open items on codeplex regarding this. Any guidance in this respect is greatly appreciated.
