Online Store

Allison Davies

If you are using the "Store" feature on your school website, can you share your experience? We are considering offering an online store for our logo apparel, etc. and are curious about other schools' experiences with using it. Thanks!

Brian Hoyt

We tried to use it and then it was broken for about a month and totally non-useable. It is a very low priority tool offered with not much support. A word of caution.

Geoffrey Goodfellow

We used it for the first time this past summer for our bookstore sales.  Typically, students would come to school to purchase books and other supplies, but with COVID-19, we needed to find something remote.  We were able to add each book as an item item in the store catalog.  Parents/Students were able to select the items they wanted to purchase, they paid for everything online, and we get an "order" that lets us pull the items from our inventory and then deliver to each student on the first day of school.  Worked very well for us, and honestly we might not go back to an in-person system after gaining this efficiency.


The store module is not perfect.  It is still build on the old podium interface so is a little clunky.  I wish there were more inventory controls.  (The inventory reports are good to show what has been sold in a variety of formats, but I would love to key in how many of certain item I have and when they are fully sold then have that item automatically show as sold out or prompt me to order more, but it isn't that sophisticated.)


The only other thought is that in forcing people to pay online, there are credit card fees in the background, so we raised the retail cost slightly of each product to cover these.


Overall a positive experience but agree it needs some Development attention to make it even better.

Julie Horvath

Even more of note is that you think you can set the Inventory count as it allows you to set a number of items. Say I have 100 items of student made wreaths, and I know they will sell out. Unlike the Registration module, where you can stop sales at 100, you cannot in the Online Store. You must update the count manually and set the item count to 0. Otherwise, the system will continue to sell the item - and you must contact the person(s) who bought the unavailable item and refund the money.


Vote in the Idea bank to upvote these improvements. Go to the Ideas and search for Inventory as there are a LOT of ideas regarding this:
https://community.blackbaud.com/products/k12/ideas


 

Nicole Jamieson

We have found that the Store feature does not meet all of our needs.  The system does not allow the use of coupon codes or discounts to be given on the site which makes it challenging to offer customers a holiday sale or a discount if they belong to a special group (ex. alums from a specific class year). The page layout cannot be customized by our staff and the pictures of the items cannot be enlarged and are always very small (including thumbnails). It is not possible to click on the item name and be taken to a bigger description of that item. The online store also does not connect to the physical store's POS system that is used and therefore, the inventory does update in real time.  Overall, the store is not very user friendly for customers and does not provide an exciting shopping experience.  

Allison Davies

Thank you, Brian, Geoffrey, Julie, and Nicole! Your feedback, with specific details about your experiences, is very helpful and has helped us to understand that the Store product is probably not going to fulfill our needs right now.