Copyright © 2001, William Weiland
Contact your customers a few days or weeks after they've purchased products at your store with an automatically generated "stock" email. This module captures pertinent order information and uses it for generating a follow-on email. This gives you an opportunity to guage customer satisfaction with your store.
1) In admin, click Add Modules
2) Click the file upload button
3) Browse to find the followon.mv file on your hard drive and upload
4) Click Add to add it to the domain
5) Click the image to the left of your store name
6) Click on the Order Fulfillment Configuration link
7) Check the box to the left of Follow-on Contact and select Update
8) Click on Add Modules again
9) Click the file upload button
10) Browse to find the cim_log.mv file on your hard drive and upload
11) Click Add to add it to the domain
12) Click the image to the left of your store name
13) Click on the Logging Configuration link
14) Check the box to the left of CIM Activity Log and select Update
In the Fulfillment Configuration screen you will enter several items. One of them is which screen you will have the program "flush" pending emails. When a customer browses your store, at the end of a particular screen load, merchant will flush the pending emails if the last digit of the seconds (time) is a zero. Thus, about every 10th display of the screen you choose, Merchant will flush the next batch of pending orders. It will only flush five at a time or no more than a 15 second delay. I have found that the delay is probably less than a second to flush emails to the server send mail spool. I also think the Product (PROD) screen is the best location to include the "flush". If your customers rarely visit that screen, you may need to pick a different screen.
You may want to test this module by sending all of the follow-on emails to you until you are sure you have them the way you want them to look. Scroll down to line 298. There you will see two lines related to the variable for the "to" address. One is commented out using the double # characters. If you swap them so that the "to" address takes its assignment from the "from" address (the other line), the emails will go to the from address. When you are comfortable that all is well, you can the switch the addresses to send to the customer's actual address.