Overview
PurpleAdmin makes it easier for you to give excellent customer service as many of the time-consuming tasks associated with keeping customers informed and happy have been automated:
- PurpleAdmin informs customers automatically about changes to the status of their order by email. You can customize and edit the messages sent
- Customers can opt to receive an SMS message when their order is dispatched
- Customers can view the status of their orders online at any time
- Customers can arrange to return goods from their ‘account area’
These features drastically reduce the number of phone enquiries from customers, and improve feedback scores: Shortly after you have fully dispatched an order, your customer is asked for feedback, visible to you or your staff as you decide.
PurpleAdmin updates in real-time to give up-to-the-minute information on the status of orders and products – new orders simply appear on screen!
Full integration with credit card payments, bar-code scanners, label printers and your website allows your staff to process orders efficiently. Detailed information for each order is available within a couple of clicks, providing for excellent customer service.
In short, you always know what is happening at whatever level you chose to be involved. From an overview of the month’s sales down to what time an individual order was dispatched, you are in control.
An innovative, secure, two-factor authentication process ensures that the system is accessible only to authorised users.
Data displayed is carefully filtered based on the roll assigned to each user, ensuring that all members of staff can carry out their tasks without having access to unnecessary, sensitive information. Examples of such rolls include Manager, Customer Service Staff, Web Developer and Dispatcher.
You control:
- Who can view customer data
- Who can update the products and other details appearing on your website
- Who can see reports on sales or staff actions
We issue each of your users with an encrypted Authentication Token that plugs into the computer’s USB port. In addition, the user must enter their PIN when logging on; this combination uniquely identifies them to the system.
The use of USB technology means that no special hardware is required and the admin system can be used on any PC. The access level of each Authentication Token is controlled centrally by PurpleFishes, allowing permissions to be changed or access revoked instantly.
We host PurpleAdmin on high-specification Dell servers located in a secure London data-centre. Our data-centre has backup power supplies, redundant internet connections, fire detection and suppression, and multi-level access controls. Our network and servers meet the Payment Card Industry (PCI) security standard.
Every action taken by every user is comprehensively logged allowing auditors to have a detailed view of when, from where and by whom the separate stages of order processing took place. Reports of all actions grouped by user are available to download from the “Reporting” section of PurpleAdmin.
Backups of the database take place regularly through an automated procedure to a fail-over standby server. This ensures that even in the event of a failure at one location, your data would be safe.
PurpleAdmin is available as a download from a password protected website. You only need to install it once and the installation takes no more than 5 minutes.
There is no need for your company to own and maintain its own servers to run PurpleAdmin. Your website and databases are stored on co-located servers in a world-class data centre, keeping uptime to an absolute maximum.
You can connect to your data from anywhere in the world with a fast internet connection, provided you have your authentication token with you.
To keep you up to date with the health of your business, numerous, advanced reports providing both an at-a-glance overview of your shop(s) and a detailed look at individual orders, products and customers are included.
We designed the reports to present information in a clear and concise manner, with different reports tailored to different departmental heads, staff, directors and investors.
PurpleAdmin is flexible enough to grow with your business and has the ability to manage an infinite number of shops and orders.
An advanced concurrency system allows many users to connect at the same time, yet with no danger of one user's actions interfering with another's.
In order to get the best from PurpleAdmin, we suggest your PCs have at least the specification below. As a guide, PurpleAdmin will run on any computer under 2 years old. The minimum requirements are:
- 1.4 GHz Processor, or faster
- 512 MB RAM, or greater
- Windows XP or Windows Vista
- 1280x800 pixel monitor or greater
- Capable of running the .Net Framework v2
- Business-level broadband connection or better (performance on a standard home connection will be poor at peak times)
Certain features require additional hardware:
- Dymo LabelWriter (compatible with version 7.6 of the Dymo software or higher) for automatic label printing
- Barcode scanner for ‘scan on dispatch’ feature
PurpleAdmin can be integrated with your choice of payment provider. Using Protx with VPS Direct enables you to take cards on a web page that is a continuation of your site, rather than one branded by the payment provider.
All payments are handled on a secure server using SSL to encrypt the data in transit. Although our data security measures have been audited and comply with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standard, PurpleAdmin does not store any card details. Instead, we store 3 codes returned by the payment processor which enable you (and only you) to further charge the customer’s card, or initiate a refund.
PurpleAdmin includes tools to help identify and investigate suspicious orders, allowing you to make an informed decision about whether to ship the goods, or not.
As we use PurpleAdmin in our own ecommerce business, we are constantly refining existing features and adding new ones. We release these updates free of charge (provided your license is current) to all users.
When the program launches, it contacts our servers and automatically installs any updates.
Getting started using PurpleAdmin to enter products (likely to be the first job) and administer orders couldn’t be easier. We provide a collection of online video tutorials talking you through the various aspects of the system.
You and your staff can be using the system effectively in as little as 1 hour.
Orders
This section of PurpleAdmin allows you to view and administer the orders placed on your website, print invoices and labels, and add messages to orders.
Orders in PurpleAdmin are grouped by status. From “Placed” to “Refunded”, you can see at a glance how many orders you have at each stage.
When a customer accepts your terms and conditions online then their order will appear in the ‘Placed’ folder at the top of the left column. When payment is made, the order is automatically moved into the ‘Paid’ folder.
As you and your staff move orders, print invoices and mark goods dispatched the display updates automatically in real-time.
The orders screen contains the following features that improve the speed and the effectiveness of your customer service function:
- Double-click an order for complete history (right)
- Search by order number or name
- View the customer’s invoice
- Add notes and tasks to orders and see those left by other users
- Mark refunds and exchanges
- Automatically inform customers of status changes to their order
- Automatically email customers on dispatch and send an SMS if requested
Often an order has changes or special instructions. For instance, an item may be out of stock and when contacted, the customer agrees to an alternative product as a substitution. These special instructions can be noted on the order using the star system.
Right-click on an order to add a note, and then click to save. The system will add a coloured star to the order, and display the note beneath the invoice. You can add seven different colours of star, which reflect different categories of note, for example ‘Urgent Order’ is marked with a purple star.
The orders screen contains the following features that improve the speed and accuracy of dispatch:
- Search for a customer’s order either by surname or order reference. This is especially useful when previous customers require an invoice at a later date or when resolving an outstanding customer order due to out of stock items, returns and more.
- Filter orders by all shops, an individual shop or by star notifications according to your needs. For example, if you wish to review star notifications for items on back order or customer modifications simply select 'Starred Orders Only' to be shown only the orders which have stars.
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Move orders into folders according to its status, for example an order which is placed by a customer and paid for will be located in the 'Paid' section and can be moved into the 'Accepted' section by clicking the Accept action button.
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Contact customers faster by viewing the 'Contact Details' section which will give you access to the customers email address and telephone number. Clicking the email address will open your default mail client and auto fill the To: and Subject: fields.
- Identify at a glance which orders are taking too long to dispatch and prioritise their processing. In the colour coded order list, orders will be highlighted amber if not dispatched within 3 days and red if not dispatched within 5 days.
- Print individual shipping labels, or batch print labels for all orders that are ready for dispatch.
- Print your customer’s invoice and notify them their goods are ready for dispatch in one action. This process keeps your customers up to date on the status of their order and prevents the dispatch personnel from having to contact them manually.
- Notify customers of their order status simply by moving their order entry into another status folder. For example, moving an order from accepted to waiting would email the customer to let them know that there will be a delay with their order and that the customer services team will contact them. Similarly, moving an order from accepted to ready would notify the customer that the goods are in stock and are ready for dispatch.
- When an order has been packed, you can scan the bar code on the shipping label, which will automatically mark the customer’s order dispatched in PurpleAdmin and send an email to notify the customer.
- Label printing
- Automatic emails
- Automatic invoice printing
- Barcode scan on dispatch
- Order messages
Products
This section of PurpleAdmin allows you to add categories and products for display on your website. Changes made here will update within a couple of seconds on your live website, and be visible to your visitors.
You can add, edit and delete categories, add short and long descriptions or even an image to symbolise the category if so desired.
You can also select from your available product layouts the one you think fits the product type best.
PurpleAdmin stores 25 pieces of information about each of your products. Some of this information is displayed with the product to the customer online, and some of it is used for creating reports.
Individual products are listed in the centre column of this screen when a category is selected. A live preview of the selected product is shown on the right hand side of the window.
Performance
The Performance tab contains the Sales statistics and Feedback and Reviews sections.
This screen allows you to track today’s sales, the month’s sales to date, and the projected sales for the month.
After customers have received their order they are encouraged to log into their account and leave feedback on the service they have received. They are asked to rate the service received out of five, whether they would recommend the site and whether they would shop again. There is also a box to enter a short comment.
In PurpleAdmin, you can view this feedback. There are options to approve the feedback (or remove offensive content) and display it on the site if you so wish.
Customers are also encouraged to write a review about their purchase. In a similar way to feedback, reviews can be moderated and either shown on the site or hidden. These reviews will appear below the associated product on your website.
Marketing tools
The Marketing Tools tab contains the Discounts & Vouches, Affiliates and Bulk Email sections.
This section allows you to administer gift vouchers and promotional discounts. PurpleAdmin can automatically generate your discount code for you, or you can enter your own. You set an expiry date and an amount and then the discount code is ready for distribution to customers in email shots, promotional literature etc.
This is an important feature of PurpleAdmin, as it is a way of generating more sales from your website. When people sign up on your website to join as an affiliate (someone who will generate traffic to your website for a percentage of the sale) their details will appear in this section of PurpleAdmin for approval.
This feature allows you to send email to all of your previous customers who have agreed to receive it.
You can send a preview to an email address of your choice to ensure that it is correctly formatted, before sending to your customers.
The message body supports HTML, which can be customised by including your customers’ names. There is a safeguard in place to prevent bulk email from accidentally being sent.
Administration
The Administration tab contains the Shop and Global Settings sections.
The shops section of PurpleAdmin contains some basic settings that apply to an individual shop. If you run more than one shop then they will appear as a list, and each can be configured independently.
Features include:
- 3 x messages which appear at the bottom of each customer invoice, for example a promotion with discount code.
- Administration of delivery options and carriage surcharges
- Frequently asked questions and their answers
This section of PurpleAdmin is concerned with global settings, which apply to all of your online shops. The information here is displayed in numerous places on your website(s), on invoices and on emails.
Every time the status of a customer’s order changes, for example, when an order is dispatched, the customer is sent an email to advise them. You can use this section to edit the emails that are sent out for each of these statuses.