Understanding Quote and Order Workflows
In this post, we’ll discuss how Quotes and Orders work in My Custom Bakes.
If you have a Product in your shop that’s Variable in pricing and a client adds that to their cart, they trigger our Quote workflow. To summarize, Variable priced products are products that do not have set pricing: you can set a starting price, and depending on the requests from your clients, you have the ability to change the price before sending the final Quote back to your client for Approval. This feature is most commonly used for custom products, such as decorated cookies, cakes or other treats. (If you want to learn more about Products, read our post HERE.)
Here are some shops with Variable priced products – you can tell that something is Variable priced because they will display with prices “starting at”:
- https://www.mycustombakes.com/jessaddsprinkles/products
- https://www.mycustombakes.com/toadilybakeddesserts/products
- https://www.mycustombakes.com/bakesbykelseyk/products
- https://www.mycustombakes.com/laskuki/products
When a client submits a quote request from your MCB shop, they will receive a confirmation email which tells them that their Quote has been received, and that the baker (you) will respond back within a certain amount of time, which you commit to in your Business dashboard.
You’ll also see all Quote requests in your Quotes Dashboard as they come in:
Click on each Quote to review it, make edits (including payment schedule), and send Quotes to your clients for Approval to confirm their Order.
We *do not* allow bakers to override the status to “approve” Quotes on behalf of the client. We have experienced situations where bakers moved the status without approval from the client, resulting in some awkward situations all around. As a baker, if you want to place an order on behalf of a client or you already know they will be OK with the products and pricing, skip the Quote process and manually add an order to your Orders dashboard.
When Quotes are approved by both parties, the Quote is locked, and it becomes an Order. You can no longer update the Quote. Quote stay in your Quotes dashboard to serve as a paper trail, but once they are approved/canceled, there’s no great use for them. They either turn into an actual Order, or they do not.
Also, when a client places an order for Direct checkout, Fixed Priced products, those orders get automatically get added to your Orders dashboard. This is the standard ecommerce dashboard most of us are familiar with, and you can click in to each individual order to view the status and make changes as needed. Use the Statuses and the Chat features to keep your organized and to help with communications with your clients.
Your clients will receive email notifications when:
- They request a new Quote or place an Order on the website
- The Status of the Quote or Order Changes (One exception: when your Order status is set to “Ready for Delivery”, your client does NOT get an email- this is an internal status for you to place orders into a intermediate state so you know it’s ready for fulfillment)
- When they have unread Chat messages from you (~ 15 minute delay)
- When deposit/payment is due (we send reminders for 2 days, 1 day before payment is due and and overdue reminder 1 day after payment is due)
- After payment is made, they will receive a receipt
You will also get email notifications for:
- quote/order statuses changes
- order delivery (1 week before of due date)
- quote (2 days before quotes are due back to the client) reminders, etc.
You can edit your email preference in the Settings > Account > Email Alert Settings section of your Dashboard.
Please join our FB group to see how other people are using MCB and to get community support, and if you have additional questions or comments, please reach out to us: support@mycustombakes.com – Thank you!