[ic] employees generating quotes

[DB]

> Hello all, I have some design questions..
> 
> What I would like to do is have employees generate quotes for clients from the 
> shopping cart. 
> 
> If I create employee accounts to the Admin section, they can go to 
> Orders->Enter Order and fill in the fields.. but they can't browse the 
> catalog on the front end (as the clients would) to generate this quote. 
> Is there an easy way to wrap the lib/UI/pages/admin/order.html around the cart 
> so the browsable catalog would be between the "Order Entry" title and the 
> "Shipping Address" section?
> 
> As a side feature in this section, rather than entering the client name in and 
> hitting find, a pull-down generated via the userdb would be pretty cool.
> 
> The other option I've thought about is, using the userdb and customer UI 
> section for the employees, and creating a clientsdb.
> The thought is, an employee has a standard userdb account, not an Admin 
> section account. They can add, remove, edit, clients and then select which 
> client they are generating the quote for, and continue to browse the cart.
> The quote would include the employee contact info, then the client info, 
> followed by the quote.
> 
> Has anybody already done this or something similar?
> Any alternative ideas?
> Suggestions?
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> GeoffS
> 
> -- 
> Geoff Sternecker


I set up a quote generator which works quite well for me. I wrote a cgi 
script which gets called from a password protected web page. That page 
contains a form with fields for customer email, a textarea for comments, 
and a list of skus each with a associated qty. When the fields are 
completed and the form submitted, the script generates a web page which 
has the quote number as its name. The script also emails that page's URL 
to the customer. The email also has a text version of the quote.

 From that email, the customer clicks the URL to this generated web 
page. This generated web page contains a link to a pre-populated IC 
shopping cart. I use this intermediate step to avoid sending emails with 
very long URLs that often break because of wrapping.

I'm sure more elegant solutions exist but this works quite well for us. 
A large fraction of these quotes result in orders, I think because the 
pre-populated cart makes ordering easy. Often we add extra items to the 
quote list as "suggestions" and these are often purchased also. I'd be 
happy to post my script here if anyone would like to see it.

DB