@Brent@Karson et al, here’s a consequence of user choice as it applies to pickup customers.
Shipping customers have to tell you about any substitutions before you ship, by definition. I hope that is clear to everyone.
Pickup customers, however, have no such constraint. You can ask them, cajole them, plead with them to choose in advance, but they will still wander in to pick up their wine and remember they wanted to swap a Carignane for a Tempranillo.
We really really really need a way to intuitively swap wines in the POS without canceling the original club order and re-running the whole purchase. Cancel and re-run is not how it has worked in most of recorded history, and people don’t like it. It’s got to work with wines (any product actually) of equal or unequal price.
Jeff - We hear ya. IMO the payment gateway and taxes are the issue here. Once you run your club (for pickups), you charge or auth the card. This also calculates taxes (from ShipCompliant for from Vin65). Swapping bottles will either mess up ShipCompliance reporting, taxes, or the charge/auth.
I understand what your looking to do (and agree there should be a better way). I’d like to get compliance and bookkeeper’s opinions on this as well.
Well, compliance should be relatively easy. This is TR, over the counter, local, and no state lines. Check? Also, the “bond” state of the wine wouldn’t have changed, it came out of bond and became tax-paid in the initial sale and returns to bond (or maybe the TR pool?) Either way, inventory tracks. I think staying tax paid would be easier but everyone does this stuff different.
I think I am thinking first in terms of a new order and not touching the old order. The new order is self contained and can be cash or credit to deal with the difference. I personally would not want to hand cash back for a lesser value; enforcing a policy on that might be doable…
Second thought is making the return process on the original order easier. Right now I don’t even know how to train people to do that. Way too many steps. Again, compare to RMS…
The old RMS platform allowed you to add a new wine and subtract a wine that was not needed in the same transaction. Basically swap wines in and out. That would be my ideal scenario. Somehow it worked fine for all those years with the RSM system so I think it will be fine now too. Canceling the order is rediculous. Right now we Return/Refund the non-wanted wine in one transaction, then ring up the desired wine in another. A royal pain on a busy day.
Thanks for your input. What we’re hearing is that the compliance, tax, and any price changes are a non-issue for your winery if the price is the same. A quick question to get more info - if the wine is more, or less, do you charge them or refund them?
How I would like it work is for it to treat the inventory and compliance activities as a return and new order but then calculate charge only on the net differences. We need this not only for Tasting Room but for a lot of our club orders as well when people call in and want to switch out some bottles. The process of complete refund and recharge is a customer service challenge and is expensive. How the banks were able to hold refunds for so long yet take money right away is just wrong but probably not going to change that any time soon.
Let’s make this easy and use an example from before 1990. I send my kid to the store to buy mustard, but the little brat buys yellow mustard and I told him to buy brown mustard. So I go back to the store the next day to return this yellow crap and get my brown mustard.
The clerk starts a new order, scans in -1 yellow mustard and 1 brown mustard. There is a difference in price plus/minus any applicable taxes on that difference:
the yellow costs less than the brown, so I pay for the difference (doesn’t matter how).
the yellow costs more than the brown (must be a larger size), so the store refunds the difference.
Back in the day a store may have handed you a store credit slip instead of cash for the refund. For my store I am more inclined to just hand them a few dollars cash if I couldn’t convince them to buy something else.
Notice none of this has to do with wine. In my store they might have actually picked up the wrong mustard, or the t-shirt is the wrong size, etc.
Or, they decide to swap a wine on their previously run club pickup order.
It’s all the same. We used to be able to do this when we had RMS. My staff understood how to do it, the customer understood the process, and bookkeeping was okay with it.
I am much more interested in happy customers than I am in happy bookkeepers. Even my bookkeeper would agree with that!!
ps: Obviously there is a limit. “You know, this is getting into too many changes and dollars, I’m going to have to void the original order and start over.” We can all set our own policies.
Haha - Understood! We’ve also heard the opposite side of this view (where the accountants do not want to have tasting room staff make those calls), but it’s usually a large winery opinion there. We’ll be gathering more info on this and talking with more accountants to make sure whatever change is made is appropriate for most/if not all use cases.
I just want to chime in and say this is something we want desperately. It doesn’t make sense to the customer, no matter how many times you explain its for reporting or compliance. They just want to exchange their wine without a bunch of charges on their credit card.
So on the RMS system, if they want to return a Cab for $20.00 and then purchase a Sav Blanc for $18.00, the RMS system would allow you to give them back $2.00.
The reverse is also true. Return a $18.00 bottle and charge a $20.00 bottle would have you gather $2.00 from the customer.
Right now we, do a refund on the original order then make a new order to charge for the new bottle. It is cumbersome. I realize that Quickbooks has an issue with negative numbers but we don’t use Quickbooks. Hope this helps.
Belinda
Talley Vineyards -Wine Club
Celebrating 30 Years of Winemaking
805-489-0446 x20
M-F, 8:00am-4:30pm PST belinda@talleyvineyards.com
The return process on Admin is so cumbersome and cryptic that trying to do it right in a crowded TR is not happening. And on the POS (unless they fixed it) you can’t even tell if you are doing a return or a refund.
We use Quickbooks but don’t do data import. Also a non issue for us.
this is a constant problem for us too! In other retail locations say like Nordstrom for instance has a exchange button where you can return items and purchase all in the same transaction.This is what we are needing in the tasting room.
I just wanted to add in that we would very much like to see this addressed as well. As a new Vin65 client this has been the BIGGEST hang-up my staff and I have run into, and where I am getting the most resistance in our transition. Our club members are used to being able to easy switch out wines when they pick-up, and only having to worry about being charged/credited the difference. It seemed to be an easy process in our old (way less robust) system which still integrated with ShipCompliant and was able to keep track of inventory/taxes/etc just fine.
Let me say that I am totally for this and would use it a lot in the Admin Panel area during club processing when customers call to make adjustments. I only want to say that should this move forward, we need to see a prototype. I would gladly turn off split tenders to get back to an easier way to charge and refund v. what we have now. I think if we would have seen how this worked, most would have opted out of it.
Agreed, with all above. We are finding this to be more frustrating on the accounting side, in that we look at all orders and refunds and while you pull a report to show exactly what has been processed, that does not always correlate with what goes out the door. And honestly, we have so many refunds in the system in two weeks that we’re not sure everything has been rung up that has been sold. It’s too taxing to track and question. Why this refund, why that one. Leaves too much room for error.
Example, I am a clerk, I rang something up wrong, the purchase is complete, the guest is leaving or has left, am I going to go to the manager and say I made a mistake and it’s out the door, knowing that the whole order is going to get refunded and recharged, or am I going to shove it under the rug so that I don’t have to deal with it? Human nature says I’m going to just let a person walk out without charging that extra $10, or the shipping for that extra bottle on the order, knowing that I should have revised the shipping promo but didn’t, so the last bottle ships for free. It’s just too complicated.
