How to Use SmartSuite for eCommerce Orders & CRM (Template Tour)

When you are a small E commerce brand, one of the greatest challenges to systemizing is just tracking all of the information. You've got so many customers, so many SKUs, so many orders that if you mess up one piece of your process, the amount of support you need to handle can be enormous. And all of this stuff you're tracking is happening at such a high volume that it's really hard to keep track of. Oh wait, where is that T shirt order? Where is that order for those extra H vac pieces of equipment? Tracking all of these pieces can be a real challenge, both administration wise and from a process building perspective. So in this video I want to demonstrate how you can take a flexible work management software like SmartSuite, the sponsor of today's video, and build out a tracking system, a management system so that no matter what service you use for your checkout cart, for your inventory management system, no matter what you use for that, this gives you one centralized place to have all of your information visualized so you can track where are my orders, Is everything arriving on time and what do I need to do today with that? Let's dive in. Once you have this in place, you are set up to further systemize your operations by doing the things we talk about all the time on this channel, which is creating SOPs, creating documentation and automating those workflows. But before you can do any of that, you need to have this baseline structure in place. I know really, really humble ambitions for this short video, so wish me luck. All right, let's head into SmartSuite though and get us started. If you do not already have a SmartSuite account, this is a great reminder to check out our affiliate link below. Assuming you already have your account in place, to build out our first solution together to build an E Commerce brand setup, we're going to go Start with Templates smartsuite's templates are super useful. They're built right into your account for no additional cost and you can go in here and search for the word or Orders and Invoicing. This orders and Invoicing template is what I would recommend most ecommerce brands start with. If you are using SmartSuite, if you find that this is too simple for you, just know we can always make it more complicated, but it's harder to make it simpler. So I would suggest just starting simple so you don't get overwhelmed. Click Use Template and let's give it a look inside this orders and invoicing solution. Here we have four apps in place. Each app represents a different database, a different type of information that we are tracking, ranging from orders to invoices to the actual customers who are buying those orders to the actual delivery process. Now, if you are someone who is not doing your own delivery, you can just go ahead and delete this final app. That's what I'm going to do in this example. But if you are someone who does indeed deliver your own information and want to make sure that it all arrives safely, you can go ahead and track that there. Additionally, many people who are e commerce brands already track their invoicing elsewhere. If that applies to you and you're already using Shopify to make sure all of your things are paid in advance, for example, you could probably also remove the invoices piece from this journey. However, for this example, I'm going to keep this assuming that we do sometimes need to invoice for our own products. Now given this though, how do we actually use this to manage our ecommerce brand? Well, first off, we're going to customize this template like we would any olution template in SmartSuite and review the record fields. To do this, we're going to open a record in each of the apps and just make sure the field titles, the field requirements make sense for our given business. Inside this order area we have an order id. This is something that is required for all of our fields and if we go into those field settings, you can see that it is manually added and required to be unique. If you are someone that is taking orders manually, this is probably perfect for you. However, if you're someone that has your order ID tracked somewhere else in another system, you may want to change this name to be relevant to that software. So we might say order ID from Shopify or order ID from, I don't know, QuickBooks. Whatever it is you have, you may want to add that here so people on your team are very clear. Next up, let's look at the status field and make sure that these statuses make sense for our workflow for our types of orders. So pending, awaiting payment, awaiting shipment, and so on. If you are someone that is not handling the shipping, or if everything's invoiced in advance, you're probably going to want to go into this action menu, modify field settings and delete the values that do not make sense for your particular workflow. I'd also suggest reducing the color in this area so you only use color when you need something to catch your eye, although that's really personal preference. So maybe awaiting payment is something we want to catch our eye. But everything else I'm kind of fine with just a shade of gray because there's no active work we need to do in that particular flow. Make sure whatever it is works for you and then click Update field so your statuses reflect your actual workflow. If you're not sure what your workflow is, if you don't yet have that kind of customer experience journey because you're an early stage E commerce brand, you might want to check out this video up here on mapping out your process for a new service. Yes, it's a service example, but I promise it still does relate because ultimately at the end of the day, we're all service businesses. Once we have that status dialed in, we're ready to move on to order date and priority order date. I'm going to leave as is because that just reflects the date that it was created. But I am going to go ahead and check the settings here to make sure that it always defaults to today. So actually that's perfect. Next up we have priority for. For my imaginary E commerce business, I don't have any priority flags on things. Everything is important. It's all based on when the order was created. So I'm going to remove this priority flag to avoid any confusion. Next up we have items. This is using a subitem field inside of SmartSuite which allows us to have a record inside a record. And this is where we're breaking down the different items that are actually being purchased. So you see some demo data in here, but to add a new one of our own, we would add something like material 1, 2, 3, a description, size small and price 299, whatever that is. We can add these items here. This is going to become the base of our ordering system. I'm actually not going to alter too much around this items area. If you needed to modify these fields for certain values you wanted to track, you could do that here. But for me I'm going to leave it as is. Below that though, we have pricing and this is what's going to generate the overall value of this particular order for us automatically inside of SmartSuite. This is going to be really great for folks who are maybe quoting things before before it goes into their bookkeeping system. So you want to have quick math on hand. So we've got our overall items and prices and so on up above shipping fee is something that we're going to type in again. We could choose to have that default value here under field settings where we have default is always going to be maybe $25 unless we change it manually. In this case, I might Change it to 20 artificially lower it. Taxes are something that we can have set manually here, or we can choose to have this calculated. Below that we have a discount field if we wanted to have something like $50 off. And next to that, we have a subtotal which is just being typed in at this point. Finally, at the very bottom of the page, we have an fx, a function field here where we are actually adding up all of this information so we can tell what is the total of this field. So in this case, we have subtotal plus shipping fee plus tax minus discount. This formula is created using, you know, plus, minus, addition, subtraction, all the symbols you already know and love and the fields that we've already created inside our account in those other areas. So no modification needed to happen here, unless you'd like to have this added up slightly more automatically. Next up, we have the payment method, which is actually a dropdown field where we're utilizing the icons that are built into SmartSuite. This is something you can add into, say, a single select field. Click on this little guy here and pick whatever emoji icon, whatever it is that you wish to add. And that's how we're getting this. Cool. Look here, below all the pricing information, if I just collapse this section, we've got delivery and customer information. This is where we are networking together the different apps that we have. So that customer database we looked at earlier, well, that's connected here to this particular record. So if I click inside this, it takes me over to the customer's database. Let me just show you what that looks like. So if we head over to customers, we can see the wheel and tire service people here. We scroll on down, we can see that that order that we were just in is connected here. That's that linked record field doing its magic. Below that, we have the invoice field doing the same thing, but with the invoicing list allowing us to have multiple orders all invoiced to together. And then finally we have feedback on the order. This could be really nice if we actually send out some automated messaging afterwards to get some feedback on it, or if we want to track this manually based on the internal experience. If we actually wanted to use this orders area with all the networking in place, we'd want to utilize one of the views that exist inside of SmartSuite. By default, they've got two of them here, a cambion and a board view. But you can modify these views to really suit whatever you want to see things as, a timeline, a calendar, whatever your preferred flow is, you can make it happen inside of SmartSuite. But for now I'm going to leave it as a simple grid. I'm going to group it by the order status. So I'm going to look for that here. And we're going to make sure that my row size is medium for more space in this particular view. I'm also going to use some of the spotlighting features to draw my attention towards the things I want to have catch my eye. So in this case, I want anything where the order date is today. So I could easily see what today's orders are. And I'm going to just make that blue. And I'm also going to highlight anything where the total, the total for the overall order is greater than or equal to, let's just say 500. Because that's a big order in my book. I want to make sure I'm aware of it. I can add that here. That's just going to highlight the particular field and not the full record. Notice the difference there as it changes the highlighting. So that is that. And we can see, if I scroll on over, we can see those highlighted fields here. Before we can say case closed on this particular area, we're going to delete any of the views we do not need. Rename the views that we are going to use, such as this one here, and add it to our starred so we can easily access it later. Note that there is a little yellow symbol next to this view that is telling us that this view is shared. What does that mean? That means if someone goes to this particular link, they can actually see this view in real time. We could send this link then to our stakeholders, to our Warehouse team. Anyone who needs a real time update of what's happening in our ordering system, we could send this link to them and they could see it without even logging into SmartSuite. As a quick preview of what that looks like. It looks like this, which is nice and easy to skim either on a mobile device or on a computer or tablet. If I was sharing this particular view with my internal team, I'd probably also take the step to allow people to view the records, see all the fields, and just to be safe, I'd probably also remove the toolbar. So it just was a little bit simpler of an appearance. That's what this guy's doing and that's what you can do with this magical little link. So we have this template built out. What exactly do we do with it? Well, what we do with it would be what we document inside the solution guide. But that's a bit of a cop out, right? Because both you and I have our solution guide currently blank. We don't yet have a process for how to use this area. So what do we do? Well, the next time we have a order come in, which might be someone calling us up and saying, hey, I really want to have your roasted coffee inside my Airbnb, the next time we have that happen, we want to open up SmartSuite and create records for each item involved. We would be on the phone with that person, say, oh, that's great. What's your name? Who are you if I don't have your number in my phone? And they might say something like, oh, well, we're Robin's Egg bnb. We're over on the south side of town and we found out about you from Google. Great. So what we're going to do is go into our contacts area in SmartSuite while we have them on the phone. Or right after, if you'd rather jot notes on pen and paper and we'd add that information here, we'd say, okay, so it is Robin's Egg, Airbnb or bnb. Don't shoot me on that one. Robin's Egg bnb. She found us through Google. We know they are somewhere on the south side of town, so we'll do our town here. So we might add South Salt Lake in my case here. We don't yet know where they're located, but we could look that up later. And we know what number they called from, so we could add that here. This right here would be us setting up the customer record for this person, which we could do again while they're on the phone if we're quick or right after. Once we have that in, either after the call or again during it, we could just scroll on down and also link an order because Robin from Robin's Egg is calling us saying that, hey, she wants to add an order for our wholesale coffee. So we're going to click down here on link to orders and we are going to add a new order. We can see there's no current pending orders for Robin because she's a new customer who just called us. So we're going to click create new record. In this case, maybe she's making a phone call order. So there is not an order ID from Shopify, but we can add one here. So we're just going to call this four because that's the most recent number we have, we can say that the status is awaiting payment. The order date is today, which is what it defaults to, and we can add a detail for what this person ordered. So at this point, we'd need to have some information from Robin in order to create this order. So while we're on the phone, we might ask. Okay, great. So what exactly are you looking to get an order of our ground coffee and French roast. Oh, perfect. Let me just write that down. That's what we put here in the items area. We're tracking down what the order actually is. If you are tracking your orders in, say, Shopify or whatever, you might want to skip this field because you already have that information tracked in Shopify and you could just look it up by the order id. But for Robin's case, on the phone right now, we want to track this. Below this, we get to pricing. If we want to give Robin a quote while we're on the phone, we could fill in this remaining information while we're sitting here and prepare it so that we could share it with her on the phone. Or we could just let her know that we'll send an invoice after. Either way, we want to take some time to fill out this pricing information if we're going to generate our price from SmartSuite. In this case, our total for this order is going to be 425. And we could just say that over the phone or send off the invoice via email later, either using the SmartSuite email feature, which, yes, does exist. And yes, is very cool. And we can do that by either sharing by email parts of this particular thread, or using a SmartSuite email automation, or by just sending an email the good old fashioned way. Whatever works for you. You want to make sure you send that off so the client has it. And just like that, we've created a new client here. We've added the order into our account. Order 004 created today. How do we know it's today? Because it's blue. Thanks to our conditional logic. We open that up in here, we see the details of the record, and now our bookkeeper needs to send off that invoice so we can actually get this from waiting on payment to actually paid. So how do we do that? Well, in this imaginary flow, maybe I am my own bookkeeper, so I would just come in here and the next step I would do is open my order, scroll on down, and create a new invoice so I can connect it together. If your bookkeeper is a separate person from you. Maybe you want to have a SmartSuite Automation send a notification to your bookkeeper to let them know. And what our automation is going to do here is whenever a record is updated, in this case in our orders area and the status becomes awaiting payment, then we're going to send an email to our imaginary bookkeeper saying hey, send the invoice for this particular order using the dynamic fields set from the triggering tasks. So in this case it would send an email saying send invoice for order number four for Robin's Egg Airbnb. Shoot, I did it again. Robin's Egg BNB for order number four and we would send this off and we'd also have a notification send inside of SmartSuite. This could be an additional alert that we could send out to make sure that that invoicing happens very quickly. And as soon as it's done, that status for order number four could change from awaiting payment to something like completed or awaiting shipment or whatever it is. Make sense? I hope so, because if you are ready to implement this inside your account, after you use our affiliate link for SmartSuite to get this set up, you'll want to just click delete it just to make sure that you have all the demo data removed. Ooh, and a little pro tip here. If you're someone who's like, oh my gosh, I have so much information to add, don't get overwhelmed by it, because you can indeed import information here too. If you have your client database or your invoices already tracked elsewhere and you want to just pull them in. So that's how you can go about managing orders, invoices and customer information for your E Commerce brand inside of SmartSuite. Whether you're a creator, a maker, a dropshipper, or just an E Commerce digital seller, hopefully this is a helpful example for how you can avoid having to have everything in those backend systems that are ugly to look at, and instead bring some of those management tasks into one comprehensive work management software that not only is appealing to look at, but allows you to track everything in one spot automate based on that information and keep things organized and reportable so you can actually make sure you're finding the information you need to find. Ooh, and speaking of reportable, once you have this data in SmartSuite, you can make beautiful dashboard reports based on this information. For an example of that, check out the Sales Reporting dashboard video that we'll have linked somewhere around the screen at the end here. I think you'll really like it. Don't forget to get your affiliate link for SmartSuite in the description below. And until next time, enjoy the process.