The importance of an e-commerce website was felt strong during the COVID19 pandemic. We seen small businesses fight neck to neck and some times even out perform well established businesses when equipped with effective web and mobile solutions. This resulted an influx of IT spending and new development.

During the pandemic I got involved upgrading 3 websites. Pre pandemic I had only one in my portfolio. This increase is actually what made me start on LaundryRails. It is more like a pre-stitched website with most if not all the bells and whistles that can be easily customised to business needs. That way I can offer a good quality fully featured website for the price of a smaller custom built website.

One of the common points I had detail clients are related to the invoicing and billing procedure. The fact that even if we have a shopping cart feature why we shouldn't bill the user prior to pickup.

Background

Assume a hypothetical laundry business laundry.com. The business has a basic website The customer will dial a number and a team will visit and pick-up the laundry and once processed deliver to the same or different address. The website will have different sections namely "marketing", "admin", "transport". The "marketing" section of the website is the public facing section of the website. It is what your customers and search engines see. The "admin" section of the website if for your staff. You will do administrative tasks like assigning transport personal for delivery/pickup, make/update invoices, responding to complaints, generating reports, payroll management etc. The "transport" section is dedicated for your staff dedicated for pickup and delivery built expecting to be used using a phone/tablet.

Invoicing

When it comes to invoicing the user you have the option to add a shopping cart feature in the marketing website. Clients will add items to their baskets. They will specify the weight / number of items and any customisation they want (ex: colour safe bleach) that will modify the price. The user completes the process and goes to a checkout page to place an order to pickup. We also introduce a transport fee for certain zip-codes or locations exceeding lets say 10km from the centre.

There is an issue with this approach. As a laundry owner you will know that this is only an estimate. As a result every laundry website I touched had to have a disclaimer "this is only an estimate". Because it is an estimate we shouldn't bill the user or we will have to re-bill the user or make a refund. That emanates UX smell and screams out loud that the process is not refined. It will even lead to loosing customers.

Recommended Flow

It is a good idea to have a shopping cart feature. It gives the user a price estimate. But we must clearly state that it is only an estimate. This gives your team an estimate as to what kind of payload to expect. For example if it is a small load, you can make way in an already almost full delivery van. This also becomes a good starting point to make the actual bill.

Your staff members will go through the items and add the cart items to the invoice one by one making necessary corrections in the process. Once the bill is finalised we can forward the bill to the user by email, SMS and notifications (mobile app). If the user chooses to pay online we can direct the user to a PayPal, Stripe or other payment method powered payment page. The chances are most if not all customers these days will choose to pay online.