Frequently Asked Questions for HoverCart to eCommerce Plugin Migration
As your online store grows, your current eCommerce platform may not have the capabilities to take your company to the next level. Many businesses have to migrate their website to a platform with the features and functionalities needed to achieve their business objectives.
However, migrating to a new website platform is rarely “plug-and-play.” The migration process is often fraught with issues and challenges.
Running a successful business often takes more software than just your eCommerce platform, especially if you sell across multiple sales channels. To automate your business processes between all these systems, you need integration. Your systems need to be able to talk to each other and pass data back and forth.
Below you will find some such common questions or situations when migrating from the Quivers HoverCart to a Quivers eCommerce Plugin:
How will payments work? Do we have to create an account somewhere, or you will only send a bill monthly?
- You will need to have a payment processor since Quivers will no longer be collecting payments for you. Stripe is an excellent option, but there are many good ones out there! It is best to first make sure the payment processor chosen is compatible with any plugins (such as a pre-order plugin) you plan to use.
- Please note that fulfiller payments will be offset for one pay period as Quivers needs to have the funds from your business before paying your fulfillers. Quivers uses an auto-debit program for this purpose.
- Additionally, Quivers will no longer charge the 2.9% transaction fee since we will not be collecting the credit card payment. Because of this, we recommend you apply a 2.9% marketing fee to your fulfillers to cover the costs of processing payments. That 2.9% would then come back to you the merchant when fulfillers fulfill orders.
Can certain products, those that are not fulfilled by fulfillers, not be synced to Quivers?
- All items will sync to Quivers when using the eCommerce Plugin. You can, however, have certain orders which are “direct fulfill only” so that we do not offer those to fulfillers. There is not currently a way to pull in specific orders to Quivers.
- So, for example, if someone buys Product A and Product B, and Product A cannot be fulfilled by fulfillers, we would offer Product B to fulfillers but the other item would be fulfilled directly.
Are we the only company using the Quivers eCommerce Plugin integration?
- Quivers has many clients utilizing our various plugin options. The WooCommerce plugin has been in use for over a year now, and it is the most used, followed by Magento, and then Shopify.
Does the Quivers eCommerce Plugin have the ability to charge the customer when an order has been claimed?
- No, the Quivers plugin only handles the order once it has been successfully placed within your eCommerce platform and does not interact with orders before that time.
- If the payment fails with your payment processor, but it has already been ingested into Quivers, the collection of payment would need to be handled in your eCommerce platform. In other words, once an order is ingested from Quivers, it will go through processing.
How are Shipping Confirmation emails handled?
- When an order is shipped from an eCommerce platform, Quivers only sends a shipping confirmation to the customer if the order is fulfiller fulfilled. This is because the user will need the fulfiller's contact information for questions/concerns.
- If the order is fulfilled by merchant, the Shipping Confirmation email will be triggered by their eCommerce platform.
How are Back-orders/Pre-orders handled?
- You control if fulfillers will see back-ordered or pre-ordered orders via the Order Settings in the Admin Panel. "Defer Fulfiller Availability" is the setting you should look for; if enabled, the order will not beacon out until it is lifted from that status.
- If this is disabled, the order will beacon regardless of status and can be claimed regardless of status.
Can you add a "charge before shipment" button?
- Quivers deliberately does not interact with the payment gateway, since we are not the payment processor.
Can payment be taken on any status?
- When utilizing our own payment gateway, Quivers does not capture on the claim. We authorize the payment at checkout and a given authorization lasts for 7 days until it expires. Since the number of funds needed to capture can change based on who fulfills the order, we wait as long as possible to capture to ensure we're capturing the most accurate amount of funds possible. The capture amount ends up changing based on which fulfillers may fulfill an order, partial cancellations, or how close to the settlement period close it is.
- We don't capture on claim, as orders can still be unclaimed and fulfilled by a different business even at that step, which could result in capturing less funds than we would need to collect in such a case.
- The above logic would not be able to be reproduced in your eCommerce platform. Given this, since you would be on an external gateway model where we invoice you to cover the costs of our transaction fees and fulfiller fulfilled orders, we recommend the approach which enables you to have the quickest cash flow possible, or capturing as early as possible.
When should a payment be captured?
- Quivers recommends capturing the payment immediately under the assumption that you would not have delays fulfilling orders.
- If most orders are back-ordered and they do not want to capture the funds right away, then we again recommend you do whatever works best for you within your own platform. When you are using your own payment gateway; it is up to you to decide how you want to charge the customer and when to capture funds. When Quivers is not the payment processor, we do not interact with payment. Instead, we merely sync across the status of the order.
Does Quivers adapt to eCommerce Platforms to make sure we can capture payments on release with our own payment processor?
- When a merchant is using their own payment gateway, Quivers is no longer involved with the payment processing for your eCommerce environment. For whatever payment gateway you intend to use on your eCommerce environment, it will be up to you the merchant to configure that in a way that best suits you.
For “pay later” plugins, at what time do they charge the client’s credit card if the fulfiller claimed and shipped the items? Are they charging manually or is there an integration that charges when an order is claimed?
- We do not currently have any clients which collect payments when an order is shipped, due to the risk (issues with being able to collect the payment due to a credit card declining, etc.). This is especially true for high dollar items; it is a big risk to not know if the money will be there when you go to process the order.
- We do, however, have many clients using pay later plugins like Afterpay, etc., which allow customers to pay in installments for larger ticket items.
If I am using a "pre-order plugin" in WooCommerce, could Quivers trigger said plugin to collect payment on the “Processing” status?
- We would then recommend making all orders that come through set immediately to the on-hold status, and Quivers can be set to pick up from "On Hold." Our plugin would then change to "Processing" in the eCommerce platform only if no fulfillers pick up the order.
- If a fulfiller does fulfill the order, it goes straight from "On Hold" to "Complete."