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OFBiz for Small to Mid-Sized E-Commerce: Part 1

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

How Does OFBiz Meet the More Basic Needs of a Small to Mid-Sized E-Commerce Operation?

In this day and age, almost everyone is familiar with e-commerce storefronts. But relatively few are privy to the back-end: What does it look like for a business to manage a product catalog, fulfill orders, and provide service and support to customers? Is there a single online app that does all of that?

Maybe the business simply receives a system email with the order details, and pick, pack, and ship are paper-driven. For the lowest-volume sales and simplest supply chain, this can work. In fact, it’s how many e-commerce businesses get their start. But when orders pour in, businesses find it hard to survive without automated customer, order, inventory, and fulfillment management capabilities.

Small to mid-sized businesses can turn to OFBiz for a basic, out-of-the box suite of of apps to manage e-commerce. But figuring out exactly which features to implement is a challenge, especially for OFBiz and open-source newcomers.

With 16 mature applications and 8700 database objects and counting, OFBiz may overwhelm stakeholders seeking support for their customer service and warehouse operations. The vast and generic flexibility of the OFBiz framework presents potential end-users with literally thousands of options from which to choose, and all out-of-the-box.

HotWax Media’s business is to help clients cut to core functionality with a concise OFBiz solution, and over the years, we’ve developed a good sense of what most e-commerce customers want. In this series, we’ll clear a path through OFBiz’s complexity to the most straightforward out-of-the-box implementation for small or mid-sized businesses. Each post will map back to the following Must Haves.

OFBiz eCommerce

Eleven E-Commerce Management Must Haves

  1. Control the type, relevance, and amount of product information on the storefront
  2. Know when inventory is low and order goods from suppliers with ease
  3. Receive products into the warehouse by way of the original purchase order
  4. Track product inventory quantities and warehouse locations real-time
  5. Queue up orders for picking and get them all set for packing
  6. Pack orders and ship them out the door
  7. Make returns easy on Customer Service
  8. Edit an in-flight order or put it on hold
  9. Keep track of customers’ purchases, returns, and account information
  10. Offer gift cards, special offers, and discounts
  11. Have an easy way to update website content

- Laurian

Laurian Escalanti is a Senior Business Analyst based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She works directly with clients’ subject matter experts, process owners, and end users to define and document business requirements, from e-commerce, purchasing, order management, manufacturing, fulfillment, and accounting, to UI design, third-party integrations, SEO, and site analytics.

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Apache OFBiz Development, HotWax Media, OFBiz, OFBiz Development, OFBiz eCommerce | No Comments »

HotWax Media and OFBiz – 2009 OFBiz Contributions – Part 3

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

For the third volume in our series highlighting the contributions of HotWax Media to Apache Open For Business (OFBiz) in 2009, we will focus on OFBiz ERP-related components.  Specifically, we will review our OFBiz development contributions to:

  1. Accounting
  2. Manufacturing and Facility Management

Accounting

OFBiz Accounting

The Accounting Manager (along with the A/R and A/P applications) in OFBiz have come a long way recently.  HotWax Media is proud of our recent contributions to OFBiz Accounting, which include the following:

  1. Added the generation of a PDF for the AcctgTrans and related AcctgTransEntry.
  2. Allow the user to void a payment.
  3. Fixed Accounting invoice section the InvoiceSubBar Menu.
  4. Added the ability to receive payments in A/R batches.
  5. Fixed the Commission Invoice to show correct price and quantity.
  6. Added a screen under Accounts Payable -> Invoice, which will search for a purchase invoice within a given date range.
  7. Added JUnit test cases for the Accounts Receivable -> Batch Payments.
  8. Added JUnit test cases for the Accounting -> Void Payment and Cancel Invoice services.
  9. Added JUnit test case for the Accounts Payable services which create payment groups for given invoices.
  10. Created a new screen under the Accounting -> Report tab to show comparative income statements.  Added the functionality for generating CSV and PDF from this same form.
  11. Added the ability to cancel a reconciliation.
  12. Created a new accounting screen to associate GL Accounts to “Cost Centers”.
  13. Added the ability to create sales tax entries on an invoice without an order.
  14. Added a Deposit/Withdraw facility for user to deposit/withdraw payments in the Bank Account.
  15. Added a deposit slip facility to the Bank Account/Fin Account so that user can make a logical group of Payments for bulk deposit/withdraw.
  16. Added the ability for the user to create a new payment and directly associate to the current Bank Account.
  17. Added the ability to add a facility to reconcile a Bank Account by creating a new GlReconciliation record and assign bank transaction to that reconciliation id.
  18. Fixed numerous issues in the reconciliation of Gl Account.
  19. Added a new field to the FinAccountTransaction entity – statusId, Created/Approved/Canceled.
  20. Added a new field to GlReconciliation entity – statusId, Created/Reconciled.
  21. In Accounts Payable -> Invoice -> Purchase Invoice – User can now issue a check payment for incoming invoices with a given bank account id.
  22. In Account Payable -> Invoice -> Commission Run – Added a search for outgoing invoices which require a commission payment and ability to easily create commission invoices from there.
  23. In Accounts Receivable -> Payment -> Batch Payment – Added a new feature by which user can create a group of payments that can be used for reconciliation.
  24. Added/Updated most Accounting reports – Inventory Valuation, Income Statements, Comparative Income Statement, Transaction Total, Gl Account Trail Balance, Monthly Trial Balance, Cost Center, etc.  Added ability to export each to CSV and PDF.
  25. Added consolidated balance of its ROLLUP party for the aforementioned reports.
  26. Prepared JUnit test cases to verify GL Account Balance updated after execution of various accounting business process.
  27. Added support Hindi UiLables for Accounting and Party and Common component.
  28. Improved Commission Invoice services and fixed issues in Commission Invoice screens

Manufacturing and Facility Management

OFBiz Manufacturing

HotWax Media also made some solid contributions to the OFBiz Manufacturing and Facility Management components in 2009.  These OFBiz development contributions include:

  1. Enhanced support for product costing algorithms: cost formula, manufacturing costs, standard and actual costs.
  2. Implemented ability to define and import content for production runs.
  3. Added a new fulfillment process by introducing Verify Pick and Weight Package Only screens.
  4. Pick User can now select options for preparing a group on the basis of shipping method, warehouse area and number of order items – the group of orders is created according to selected options.
  5. Added additional options on the picking screen to show detailed information for each order (shipping method, number of order items per order, etc).

What’s Next?

In the final chapter in our series (Part 4), I will discuss HotWax Media’s OFBiz development contributions in the area of integrations: shipping, multi channel sales and payment processors.

- Tim

Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.

This post is part of a 4 part series. Please find the other posts in this series here:

Read Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 |Part 3 | Part 4

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Apache OFBiz Development, HotWax Media, OFBiz, OFBiz Development, OFBiz eCommerce | No Comments »

In Other News…. HotWax Media does more than just OFBiz

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

HotWax Media has extensive expertise and a unique focus on Apache OFBiz. You can see that throughout our web site, we are active in the OFBiz community, and we write about OFBiz regularly on this blog. But OFBiz is not all we do. I thought it was about time we gave some attention to the other things we do here at HotWax Media — let’s call them the non-OFBiz things. So, here we go. The only rule for today’s post: Whatever it is, it can’t include OFBiz.

We build amazing Flash microsites

Let’s begin with one of our most recent and most effective microsites: Black Diamond’s Fall 2010 Efficient Series Skis and Boots product launch microsite.

Working with the über-talented marketing/creative team at Black Diamond, we put together a highly effective microsite in support of Black Diamond’s Fall 2010 product line. Of course, the site features breathtaking imagery along with a whole bunch of the very latest in superb Black Diamond gear. There is also some thoughtful interaction design that becomes evident in the clean navigation, well-placed video, mouse-over product highlights, and 360-degree product spins from the good folks at 3DVO.

All things considered, this is the way you roll out a product line in style. The vehicle is useful, the information is rich, and the value is clear.

Black Diamond Boots Skis

Over the past 3+ years, we have also built dozens of Flash microsites on behalf of Swarmbuilder / 3POINT5 — these include sites for Patagonia, GORE-TEX, Pearl Izumi, Leatherman, Thule, and literally dozens and dozens of other brands that you probably know and love. This intensive production work has given us great experience working directly with the marketing and creative teams at some world-class brands.

Some have strict style guides; in that case, we demonstrate our mastery of UI functionality and design by strictly adhering to those pre-established guidelines as we create new microsites. In other words, for these companies, we color inside the lines, and our technical design skills are fantastic. Other companies have less established branding guidelines; for those companies, we show creativity and leadership by creating strong, innovative designs that can inform future branding efforts. In either case, and in all those cases that are somewhere in between, the common theme is that we enjoy gaining the experience points that come from working with such a wide variety of very talented folks. Also, it makes us proud that we are working for some of the absolute coolest outdoor companies in the world.

3point5

We offer complete creative services

HotWax Media has been doing design for more than 12 years now. Along the way we have instituted a process to back up the creative skills that go into corporate ID, print collateral, and web UIs. We have done numerous logos, business cards, letterheads, envelopes, brochures, post cards, t-shirts, hats, and…the list goes on. We have great relationships with local and national printers and can handle jobs of any size. Here are just a few examples of our more recent pieces:

Salt Lake Creative Services

We build good-looking, affordable CMS web sites

Alas, not every company wants or needs enterprise e-commerce. Some companies simply want to use the web to present information about their company! It’s a quaint idea, but hey, we like it too. Simple content management systems, like Joomla! and a whole bunch of others, make it quick, easy, and inexpensive to create a professional web site with content management capability. Often times these sites are appropriate for companies that sell services as opposed to products. These companies want to be able to easily control and update the information about their offerings, but they do not want to sell their services directly over the web. For these companies, the most important ideas are high-quality visual presentation and ease of use. On both counts, HotWax Media delivers.

Salt Lake Logos & Business Cards

We’ll stop here for now. This post has highlighted some of HotWax Media’s strengths that live outside of OFBiz-proper, and I hope it has been interesting. With all of that said, OFBiz remains our main focus in a big, big way. The Flash, creative, traditional web development, and other skills we have cultivated as a company over the last dozen years contribute directly to our ability to deliver the best OFBiz e-commerce and ERP systems in the world today, and that won’t change. But hey — we have a 12-year history and a broad range of skills to show for it, and that is definitely worth acknowledging.

Mike Bates is CEO at HotWax Media and will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.
Mike Bates - OFBiz Expert

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Apache OFBiz Development, HotWax Media, OFBiz, OFBiz Development, OFBiz eCommerce | No Comments »

HotWax Media and OFBiz – 2009 OFBiz Contributions – Part 2

Tuesday, January 5th, 2010

Hotwax Media OFBiz

For the second installment in our series highlighting the contributions of HotWax Media to Apache’s Open For Business (OFBiz) in 2009, we will focus on the OFBiz eCommerce related components:

  1. eCommerce
  2. Order Management
  3. Catalog and Inventory Management
  4. Marketing

eCommerce

Over the past year, the eCommerce component in OFBiz has received some much needed focus on improving and updating the interfaces provided by the out of the box (OOTB) functionality in the system.  They were littered with rigid tables, and inline styling that did not allow for the flexibility and configurability that we have come to expect in other pieces of software.

Here is a long list of functionality that has been added by HotWax Media to the OFBiz eCommerce application

  1. Implemented Layered Navigation of Categories in eCommerce
    • Layered navigation in an eCommerce application allows the user to filter the product listing based on categories, features and price ranges.
    • The user can apply multiple filters to the given product listing.
    • The user can narrow or expand the search and try different filter combinations, so as to find the desired product.
  2. Made improvements in the product review implementation.
  3. Added support for adding additional image features for a product so the user can see different view of images.
  4. Added sample data that contains a Sales Order and Purchase Order in completed status along with their Accounting entries for Shipment, Invoice and Payment.
  5. Added user friendly URLs on breadcrumbs of eCommerce/order manager.
  6. Implement contact us functionality for unregistered users.
  7. Improvement in createShoppingListItem service – If the same item is added more than one time, increase the quantity instead of adding the same item as a new line item.
  8. Implemented eCommerce product comparisons, allowing customers to compare any number of products by price, descriptions and features.  This is configurable and overridable to support different comparisons quite easily.
  9. Added tracking of products that are purchased together for future reporting.
  10. Added a widget to display the tracking of productions purchased together by eCommerce customers.
  11. Made configurable aspects of email services to provide “guaranteed” delivery for sales messaging.
  12. Major overhaul of eCommerce component CSS.
    • Added comprehensive reset styling to eCommerce to allow designers to work from a blank slate for a more consistent cross-brower user experience.
    • Removed many unused IDs and classNames, consolidated heading and button styles. Compressed eCommerce CSS by removing whitespace and converting styles to shorthand.  Resulted in 30% reduction in file size, overall file size reduced by 48%.
    • Created separated, consistent styles for all form elements.  Moved form styling into separate forms.css file.
  13. Major updates to eCommerce page markup
    • Cleanup up all sidebar screenlet views.  Slimmed down and simplified box styling by removing extra <div> tags and added consistent heading tags.
    • Completely overhauled One Page Checkout.  Removed table based layout from checkout steps and converted to semantic form structure.  Result is a much more flexible and easily styled checkout process.
    • Began work on removing table based layout from all forms throughout eCommerce component.
  14. Removed deprecated HTML elements and inline styles from eCommerce component markup.  Result is much more easily category and product detail views.
  15. Introduced BizznessTime theme to administration components, which became the default theme for OFBiz administration.  In the process of implementing the new theming functionality we:
    • Added better reset values to CSS to allow for more consistent cross-browser user experience
    • Created consistent form, heading, and button styling across all administration components
    • Removed tons of unused/unnecessary CSS from administration components styling, reducing styling file size by 60%.
  16. Enhanced survey implementation for testing scenarios of eCommerce application.

Order Management

As you’ll see from this list of enhancements, there have been plenty of places to update the Order Management system in OFBiz to be more user friendly and to have additional features available to users:

  1. While placing purchase order, the orderId can be supplied explicitly by the user. If it is not supplied then it will be created automatically.
  2. Added a new field for “cancelBackOrderDate” to be more consistent with other services like OrderItem(purchase order). Field is shown in order detail page and on Purchase order PDF if exists.  Added the scheduled service as well.
  3. Added the ability to add more then one product at a time to purchase order in order detail page with single add form.
  4. While recording PO, when the unit price of the item is edited the new value automatically gets set as last price on supplier record.
  5. After placing a purchase order, the user can now update the estimatedShipDate and estimatedDeliveryDate by editing order items in order detail page.
  6. While waiting for the inventory to arrive, user can lower the priority on inventory allocation so that other orders can be fulfilled while they are waiting for sufficient inventory to fill the larger sales order.  Order priority of order can also be be set from order detail page explicitly.
  7. Introduced a new order return type, “Wait Replacement Reserved”.  With this, when a return is accepted, a replacement order is immediately created in the “Held” status.  When the original item return is received the “Held” replacement order(s) automatically sets the status to “Approved” to clear them for fulfillment.
  8. After a return for refund, exchange orders can now can be created against original order.
  9. Added new return type “Replace Immediately”.  This could be used in a return process for which items are not expected to be returned or with items(s) that cost less then the shipping charges on the original order.
  10. Added new filters on find order page – by country, shipping method, order viewed, payment gateway response (gatewayAvsResult / gatewayScoreResult).
  11. Added an optional input field where user can specify an orderId while creating a purchase order.
  12. Enabled audit for a few additional fields on the ReturnItem entity namely returnTypeId, returnReasonId, returnQuantity, receivedQuantity and returnPrice.
  13. Added the feature to show or hide out of stock products on the front end of an eCommerce site.  This new implementation is configurable through a new field showOutOfStockProducts (by default = Y) on ProductStore.
  14. Enabled audit for a few additional fields on the OrderItem entity namely price and quantities.
  15. Enabled audit for a few additional fields on the OrderItemShipGroup entity to archive changes in shipment method.  This can be viewed through the “Order History” link under the screelet on the order detail page.
  16. Added an option to add a new shipping address from the order detail page.
  17. Added the feature to generate a pick sheet PDF for an order from the order detail page.
  18. Added a new return type “Refund Immediately” which triggers refunds when return is accepted.
  19. Added the ability to mark an order as viewed.
  20. Product Store can now be configured to set the default store credit account type – either financial account or billing account.
  21. Fixed major issues in the receive Purchase Order functionality.

Catalog and Inventory Management

Since the beginning of development of OFBiz, and definitely since the move to the Apache Software Foundation, the Catalog and Inventory component have been an established fixture in eCommerce usage.  Minor things have changed and additional pieces have been integrated, but the interfaces and the capabilities have long endured large changes in other parts of the system while remaining relatively unchanged.

Over the past year, we have added a few modifications:

  1. Promotions hooked up to shipping total adjustments – Now Shipping Total adjustments can be applied using simple promotions. Users can specify percentage discount on a specific shipping method – and can use this for free shipping if this is needed as well.
  2. Improved ProductType Hierarchy for Marketing Packages – Creating a hierarchy was possible before these modifications, but the business logic specific to parent type was never applied to the sub types, thus making hierarchy useless.  Once this change was made, we have seen usage of this feature ramp up significantly.
  3. Enhanced the find inventory screen with “sell through” information.

Marketing

Much like the catalog on inventory components in OFBiz, the marketing component has long been one of the more stable pieces in the eCommerce landscape – providing OFBiz users with simple ways to track and report on different initiatives.  Over the course of the year, we have added new reports to make it easier to track different information related to marketing initiatives.

From tracking purchases related to the tracking codes, to tracking email traffic (emails sent, bounced and opened), to tracking subscriptions made and canceled during a given time period – the data being collected has changed little, but the ability to to be able to leverage it in a meaningful way has been greatly enhanced.

What’s Next?

In my third volume in this series (Part 3), I will discuss our contributions in the area of ERP: accounting, manufacturing and facility management.

- Tim

Tim Ruppert is Chief Operating Officer at HotWax Media as well as an OFBiz project committer and active community member. Tim will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.

This post is part of a 4 part series. Please find the other posts in this series here:

Read Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Apache OFBiz Development, HotWax Media, OFBiz, OFBiz Development, OFBiz eCommerce | No Comments »

OFBiz E-commerce and ERP: 3rd Party Integrations

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Apache Open For Business (OFBiz) offers an amazing amount of functionality across a wide variety of business processes. The scope of OFBiz, as with most ERP systems, is very broad — including e-commerce, inventory and order management, accounting, manufacturing, and much more. As you consider all of the ground covered by OFBiz, it follows that any given OFBiz system is likely to encounter other systems with which it needs to gracefully interact.

3rd party integrations can sometimes become very complex. For my post today, however, let’s consider a few simple example together: we will look at three types of integrations commonly used by online e-tailers running OFBiz direct-to-consumer e-commerce storefronts.

There are many ways that HotWax Media helps our customers drive traffic to their e-commerce sites, including various SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) tactics, but we will leave detailed discussions of those tactics for a separate post. For our example today, our story begins with a visitor arriving at the OFBiz e-commerce storefront.

Upon arriving at the merchant’s OFBiz e-commerce site, the visitor browses products. There are some really effective merchandising features available with OFBiz, including cross-sell, up-sell, layered navigation, promotions, and so forth. As our visitor navigates the site and finds the products she wants, she adds them to her shopping cart. Eventually, she has her cart loaded up and is ready to checkout.

Using OFBiz, HotWax Media creates completely custom checkout experiences for our customers. One-page checkout, split shipments, anonymous checkout, coupon codes — it’s all available through OFBiz. There are, however, additional 3rd party checkout options that are also available. So these will be our first examples of 3rd party integrations available with OFBiz.

OFBiz Payment/Checkout Integrations

Google Checkout and PayPal Express checkout are both available to OFBiz merchants.

OFBiz Integration Google Paypal

The idea with these 3rd party checkout services (as with most concepts in online retail) is to boost conversion rates. This works well for users who already have established checkout preferences. For example, if our site visitor prefers PayPal Express, she simply selects that checkout option, enters her PayPal username and password, chooses her shipping method, and she is done. The benefit is that she may have saved a minute or two, and presumably she is comfortable with PayPal and confident in the quality of her purchase transaction.

OFBiz Shipping Integrations

We mentioned shipping, and this is our next example of 3rd party integration options.

OFBiz Shipping

Unless our merchant is exclusively selling digital products that are downloaded by the end user, he needs to offer shipping options in order to fulfill his orders. Using OFBiz, HotWax Media offers many integration options with 3rd party shipping services. The idea is to make this as simple as possible for the shopper by allowing her to see custom, real-time shipping costs (based on her shipping address) from a variety of carriers and allow her to select her preferred method.

OFBiz Shipping Options

Shipping integrations available with HotWax Media and OFBiz include the biggest names in shipping, such as FedEx, UPS, USPS, and DHL. We also offer more specialized integrations with Endicia (includes USPS support) and Oagis Shipping. (As of December 2009, Endicia (with USPS support), UPS WorldShip, and a more complete FedEx integration are currently not offered out-of-the-box with OFBiz, but are available through HotWax Media.) These 3rd party shipping integrations allow our online merchant to control rate display in the user’s shopping cart (using real time shipping rate quotes that the merchant can then adjust as needed — see screenshot above). Once the order is picked and packed, the merchant can automatically print shipping labels, email a tracking number and shipment confirmation to the customer, and more.

OFBiz Payment Gateway Integrations

Finally it is time to submit the order and process payment. Our visitor has her products in her cart, has selected her shipping method, and has entered her payment information. She clicks “Submit Order,” and this is where the payment gateway comes in.

OFBiz Payment Gateway

Using OFBiz, HotWax Media offers integrations with a variety of 3rd party payment gateways. The industry leaders are PayPal, Authorize.net, and Orbital, so we generally recommend one of these. These integrations offer credit card processing along with fraud monitoring, scoring, order separation for manual review, and many other useful features for our online merchant. The order is submitted, the card is processed, and there you have it — e-commerce!

That was just a simple example of a very common e-commerce use case that makes use of a few 3rd party integrations. Of course, there are many other 3rd party integrations available using OFBiz, such as multi-channel sales (eBay, Amazon, etc.), single sign-on (Crowd), and integrations with other systems like Magento. I plan to address many of these in future posts. In the mean time, for a more complete list of 3rd party integrations available from HotWax Media / OFBiz, take a look at our 3rd Party OFBiz Integrations page.

Mike Bates is CEO at HotWax Media and will join other HotWax Media employees and advisors in periodically posting thoughts here related to OFBiz, eCommerce, ERP, and related topics.
Mike Bates - OFBiz Expert

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Posted in Apache OFBiz, Apache OFBiz Development, HotWax Media, OFBiz, OFBiz Development, OFBiz eCommerce | 4 Comments »

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