V8 - Customer portal

SOS Inventory enables Pro plan subscribers to set up a portal for your business, allowing your customers to access information on their orders posted in SOS Inventory, as shown in the illustration below. Your customer portal is on Orderfacts.com, a service of SOS Inventory that is included at no additional charge.

The Customer portal setup works in conjunction with the Tracking email settings to automate customer notifications as part of order processing. 

You can give your customers the ability to view the status of their order in the Customer portal by setting up order stages.

When the transaction link is selected, it opens a customer copy of the transaction:

Customer portal setup

To setup the customer portal within SOS, go to Settings menu > Customer portal setup. The portal has very few setting options, but you are defining the website that they can access and see the status of the orders.

Options to set up your portal:

1. Enabled. Checking this box enables the portal for your customers. You can disable access if you decide it is being misused or want to reconfigure the settings.
    

2. Web address. This is the web address that your customers use to get to your portal. It is usually your company name followed by .orderfacts.com and is particular to your customers only. You cannot use “SOS” anywhere in your web address. This web address will be part of the link that shows on sales orders and sales receipts. It is defined on the Tracking email settings page (Settings > Tracking Email Config). See Tracking email config (Tracking email settings) for more information. 
    

   warningIMPORTANT: If you enter a web address and tab off the field, it will turn green--indicating it is a new address and not currently used in your SOS Inventory account. If the highlight is or turns red, this indicates that the address is being used by either another company or a secondary SOS account being used by you.

3. Company name. This is your company name as displayed to your customer on the order site. If this field is left blank, SOS Inventory uses the company name on your SOS account, as seen in the Company menu.
    

4. Footer. This is the footer that will show at the bottom of all customer portal pages. The footer is typically used for disclaimers, contact information, etc.
    

5. Require password. If enabled, requires your customer to enter a password on your company's Orderfacts login page to access the portal.  The password is a randomly generated eight-character password. You can see it in the customer definition in the Portal password field. In making your decision about whether to require a password, note the following:

   1. If a password is required, your customer can access the Order History page, as well as any individual transaction and its status (refer to the screenshots near the top of this article).

   2. If no password is required, your customer can access a copy of a sales receipt or sales order and the status of that transaction on an individual basis only. The customer cannot access the Order History page or the status of any other transaction. Since no login password is needed, the Logout link is also absent.

   3. A customer's password can be changed by your company only. Change the Portal password field on the customer's Edit page manually or by selecting the Generate a new password button. If your customer selects the I forgot my password option on the portal's login page, they will receive an email with the password your company currently has on file in the customer definition. If a customer wants a specific password, they must contact you with the specific password they wish to use so that you can make the change in their customer definition. 

       

6. Show assigned user. Checking this option shows your customer the person assigned to the order.