How to Send Shipping Confirmation Email to Customer
A - There are two methods, depending on whether you wish to send from Elliott or from your shipping manifest system. The following are the pros and cons:
- Send Shipping Confirmation from Elliott
- Pros: (1) You will be able to send the email with the line item detail of the order. (2) You have better control over who will receive the email.
- Cons: (1) You will resolve the infrastructure of sending emails through Elliott. If you are using Elliott V7.5, then you need to make sure MAPI is supported without triggering a warning message. For more information on this subject, please refer to the document in \Elliott7\Doc\OLSecUpd.pdf. (2) You might want to automate this task through Elliott Deferred Processing, which is an additional task you need to set up and ensure that it is running overnight.
- Sending Shipping Confirmation from Shipping Manifest System
- Pros: Once it is set up properly, the sending of the email is done by the backend servers, so there's nothing you need to do.
- Cons: You can't send the line item detail of your order. So when your customers receive the shipping confirmation, all they know is that something from your company is coming and the tracking number. But they don't know the content.
Using eContacts
Regardless which method you are going to use, you will need to set up eContacts for each one of your customers. To set up eContacts, go to Customer File Inquiry or Maintenance, and click on the eContact icon (looks like a person's head) on the tool bar. This is the place where you can add the contact email address for the customer. See sample screen below.
You can have multiple eContacts for a customer. By default, the primary eContact will receive the shipping confirmation email.
Sending Shipping Confirmation from Elliott
During creation of a sales order, you may click on the eContact icon, which brings up a list of potential eContacts from the customer, ship-to or salesman that can become the order e-Contact. In Elliott Global Setup -> Order Header Screen, you can configure the system to copy the primary customer eContact to become the order eContact by setting the following flag to "Y":
2. Copy Customer Primary Contact and Send Email?
Then you can override this order eContact on an order-by-order basis through the user interface shown below:
If you choose not to assign an order eContact, then the customer primary eContact will be used to send a shipping acknowledgment email.
Commercial Shipping Manifest software Starship already has a built-in integration with Elliott. It will write the tracking number to Elliott Order Notes as follows:
You may also ask your UPS or FedEx technician to manually integrate with the Elliott system and create this note through their corresponding manifest systems (i.e., Worldship for UPS and Ship Manager for FedEx).
Ship Via Code Setup
You need to make sure your ship via is configured properly for Elliott shipping confirmation email to send. Go to Elliott -> A/R -> Maintenance -> Ship Via File Maintenance. Bring up the ship via codes that you want the shipping confirmation email be sent. You will need to change the following flag to "Y":
9. Prt on Manifest Reprt & Trk# on Email
See sample screen below:
Sending Shipping Confirmation Email
In Elliott -> COP -> Processing -> Pick/Pack Tickets & Ship Labels -> Print -> Shipment Email, you can choose to send a shipment acknowledgment email either by order or posted invoice, depending on your preferred procedure. The Elliott system will find the proper orders or invoices with the tracking note above, then send the shipping acknowledgment email as follows:
Sending Shipping Confirmation Email from Shipping Manifest System
To key to get this to work is you will need the email address saved in a field that's accessible to your shipping manifest system. Most likely, this will be a field in the Elliott COP Order Header table (CPORDHDR).
To get this to work, you should go to Elliott Global Setup -> System -> eContact Manager, and answer the following flag:
10. Copy eContact E-Mail to Order ?
Set the value to:
N = Do Not Copy Email Address
1 = Copy Primary eContact Email Address to Order Comment 1
2 = Copy Primary eContact Email Address to Order Comment 2
3 = Copy Primary eContact Email Address to Order Comment 3
We suggest that you set this value to "3" since Order Comment 1 & 2 might be used for other purposes.
Then during order entry, you will find that the customer's primary eContact email address populates the Order Billing Screen comment 3 field.
When you set up the ODBC mapping with Starship, Worldship or FedEx Ship Manager, you will map CPORDHDR.ORDER_COMMMENT3 to the corresponding shipping acknowledgment email address.
As previously mentioned, using this method is relatively easy to automate. But Starship, UPS Worldship and FedEx Ship Manager can't send the detail line item information on their shipping acknowledgment email. In addition, the system will send the email to the primary eContact unless you manually override the order comment field to the alternate recipient's email address.
Alternative method
Above method shows the default method of sending shipping confirmation email through eContacts on the sales order. There is an alternative method you may wish to investigate further. See the following knowledge base article for more detail:
http://support.elliott.com/knowledgebase/articles/810765-how-to-determine-who-receives-shipping-confirmatio