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The online shop

Orders your clients place and pay for online, and the dispatch queue where you pick them, hand them over and mark them gone.

The online shop is a different job from a counter sale, even though both end up as a charge on the same account. Nobody is standing in front of you: the client has already chosen, already paid, and is now waiting. Your side of it is a queue of things to pick.

Turning it on#

Who can do this

Administrators only, under Features & Modules.

The shop is off until an administrator enables it. Two settings, and they do different things — a practice that turns on only the first has a portal with no shop in it:

Setting	What it does
Enable client portal	Lets clients register and log in at all. Without it there is nowhere for a shop to live.
Enable online shop	Shows the shop to clients, and puts Shop Dispatch on your home screen. Ticking it reveals the delivery settings below it.

Which catalogue items clients can actually buy is then decided item by item. On Update Prices, among the visibility buttons that decide where an item shows up, there is a Shop one — it only appears once the shop is enabled. Nothing reaches the shop until it is turned on for that item, which is the right default: a client should not be able to order a prescription-only medicine or a surgical procedure.

Turning Shop on for an item also adds a Product Image box to its price record. That picture is what the client sees — an item without one shows as a placeholder, which sells nothing. 400×400 px, JPG, PNG or GIF.

Careful

Go through the catalogue deliberately before you announce the shop. Turning a whole category on at once is how a schedule-controlled drug ends up on a public web page.

The dispatch queue#

Home›Shop Dispatch

Two tabs, and the difference between them matters:

Tab	Holds	Yours to pick?
Dispatch	Orders the client has paid for.	Yes. The money is in.
Unpaid Orders	Orders placed but not paid for.	No. Nothing has been paid.

Open the order to see what was bought, and whether it is a collection or a delivery.
Pick the items.
Hand them over, or send them out.
Mark the order dispatched. It leaves the queue, and the client is told.

Tip

Mark it as you hand it over, not in a batch at the end of the day. Marking it dispatched is what tells the client it is ready — a shelf full of picked orders nobody has marked is a morning of phone calls.

Note

Shop orders draw stock and post to the client's account exactly as a counter sale does, so they appear in the daily summary and the account book alongside everything else.

When a client says they ordered and you cannot find it#

This is the commonest shop question at the desk, and it nearly always has the same answer: the order is sitting in Unpaid Orders.

Careful

An order in Unpaid Orders has not been paid for and is not yours to pick. The client sees it in their account as Awaiting payment with a Pay now button — they may well believe they finished. Send them back to My Orders to pay, or ring it up as an ordinary counter sale instead.

Check the tab before you tell anybody their order is missing. What the client sees at their end — the cart, the checkout, and the status afterwards — is described in The client portal, and reading it once will answer most of what gets asked at the desk.

Collection and delivery#

By default every order is collected from the practice. If you would rather also deliver, an administrator turns it on under Features & Modules:

Setting	What it does
Offer delivery	Adds a Collect in store / Deliver choice at checkout. With it off, every order is a collection.
Delivery fee	Charged on delivery orders, entered including tax. It appears as a line on the order.
Free delivery threshold	Orders at or above this total are delivered free. Leave it blank and delivery is never free.

Note

A client choosing delivery must give a delivery address — checkout will not let them past without one. It is captured on the order, so pick from the order rather than from the address on the client record, which may be an old one.

Marking an order dispatched tells the client either Ready for collection or Dispatched, depending on which they chose.

What an order does to stock#

Selling through the shop draws stock down exactly as selling over the counter does, and writes the same ledger line, so the movement can be traced later.

The shop does not stop a client ordering something you have run out of — it sells, and the count goes negative.
A stocked item that has fallen to its low-count threshold is badged Low stock on your side.
Services and procedures carry no stock and are unaffected.

Tip

If the shop is busy, glance at Manage Stock as part of the morning routine rather than finding out at picking time. The stock history shows where everything went.

What the client is told, and when#

The shop writes to the client at three points, from your practice's own address, using your letterheads:

When	They get
They place the order	An order confirmation with what they bought.
They pay	The invoice.
You mark it dispatched	Either Ready for collection or Dispatched.

Every one of those is listed on the email history report, with whether it actually went — which is where to look when a client says they were never told.