After a lot of looking, I haven’t found anything that does everything I need. I’m hoping someone can offer some advice.
I’m starting a repair-by-mail business. The features I’d like to have:
CRM and Email Handling
Helpdesk/Tickets
Customer Portal
Webstore/approve and pay for repair from portal with credit card
Print Postage - both for the customer to ship the item to me, and for me to ship the item back.
Track Shipping - integrate with Aftership, Faro, packagtrackr
Print Label to put on repaired item
Asterisk integration
Suite seems weak in:
Web Store
Track Shipping
Print Postage
Print Label
I’m using Wordpress for CMS, and there are a number of plugins that can do all the things SuiteCRM is weak in. Wordpress has a number of CRM’s, but none are nearly good enough, not even handling incoming email. The direction I’m looking a now is to use SuiteCRM for core CRM, and somehow connect the Wordpress and/or WooCommerce to SuiteCRM. I’ve found a SuiteCRM web portal for Wordpress, but it seems limited. At this point, I’m trying to minimize or eliminate custom code, and can temporarily sacrifice some features, such as allowing a customer to print postage, or track shipping. I would like to pick a path that won’t impede adding those features later.
Has anyone done something like this? Could all these features be done in SuiteCRM? Is connecting it to Wordpress, or something else, a viable option?
What you want to achieve is possible and probably wouldn’t be to hard for a developer familiar with both SuiteCRM and word press to achieve but your not going to get away without cutting some custom code. Suite custom modules could easily be made to handle things like Printing Postage and Labels and even Track Shipping. What you want to do is use WordPress as your web store in conjunction with Suite/Sugars REST API. So when a relevant action is triggered in Wordpress (Such as a product is purchased) it makes a rest call to your SuiteCRM instance and creates or updates the required record in Suite. This can work both ways and can be done for anything that is required. But it would mean custom coding in both Wordpress and Suite to work.
I run a WordPress web design company (among other things) called NewMedia Website Design. I’ve also messed with Sugar (now Suite) internals for many years. I’ve been coding since EDS days starting in 1975… so I have a few “street creds” here.
Andy (above) gave you very, very good advice. If you are just starting your business, you have way more important things to do than in trying to glom two different (but actually somewhat alike!) systems together. Both WP and Suite have been around a long time and if it were easy to marry them both it would have been done a long time ago! It’s not easy, nor even advisable.
My suggestion is to get the business running and use whatever manual procedures you need… or buy a proprietary system that was designed from the ground-up for your industry (I’m sure there must be a few systems out there.) Once your biz is booming and you have deep pockets you can think about hiring someone (not me!) to create the ‘perfect’ solution for you. But doing this now is putting the cart before the horse.
I’m at the point where I’m just about ready to move forward with the business, even if I have to run it from pencil and paper. I still would like to get as many features implemented, have my base as close as possible to what an ideal system look like in the future (Don’t want to migrate everything to a different system).
After more searching, I found that what I can do in Wordpress (Shipping, shipping tracking, Web store) really centers around WooCommerce, and I can do those same things in Magento. So, I’d like to ask the same question again, but with using Suite/Magento. A good idea?
I don’t mind paying for code (I even found a repair plugin for Magento, but I’d still need CRM), but I’d rather pay for a plugin that’s maintained, than custom code that requires a phone call every time something stops working.
Magento is a huge codebase and I don’t know how well it dovetails with WordPress.
I believe that ShopSite has a good plugin “bridge” between its code and WordPress.
You might want to look at some of the e-com servers like Shopify, CoreCommerce, BigCommerce, etc. Some of them have rudimentary CRM built in.
Maybe Prestashop will work for you as well.
Trying to meld WordPress and e-commerce and CRM into one system is probably more than you really want do on your own.
[editorial]
As much as the WP and CRM people will hate me for saying this, their systems are dinosaurs. The next wave will be offered by the major players… Google, Apple, IBM, Amazon, and of course Adobe. These will be huge integrated systems that have every capability anyone might reasonably want… all glued together and already hosted. The ‘prototype’ for his is the Adobe Business Catalyst platform . And the new Copybloger RainMaker platform is headed this way too. The days of web jocks like my company cobbling together codebases into something that (almost) works… are numbered. Instead we’ll be choosing a platform-vendor, learning their tools, and re-selling the service of tweaking it… front-end stylization and back-end configuration.
Respectfully I and clients would appreciate avoiding custom code for basic integration between their web site such as Joomla, and if necessary paid integration for something more with their ecommerce such as Virtuemart or Magento.
Worst case, if you have instructions somewhere as to how I can code integration with say Joomla and Virtuemart (maybe Magento) with SuiteCRM that would be great! Some kind of response is expected at a minimum
Yeah, but the list of things he wants to do is so long and intricate that it would take a 600-page book to address HOW TO. So you should, with reasonable intelligence, understand that a list of steps of HOW TO do it is not possible nor palatable here. Buy a book or hire a programmer.
If he is starting a business, then he should respect the fact that programmers have their own businesses and deserve their own wages for providing their own services. And if one cannot respect that, then a curse on his company that he fails in his endeavours.
“A workman is worth his wages!” (The Bible, St. Paul)
As for the expense, consider the cost of doing manually what the program will do. Cost it out over 5 years and compare to the cost of hiring a programmer to create these integrations. Why 5 years? Because that is when you will probably need him to come in and tweak things to match up with new versions of the programs.
My short answer: yes it is possible. It will not be cheap nor fast, because your requirements even on the surface are substantial.
This connector should be a good answer to your question if you’re still interested in it. Otherwise it could help others. Searching a solution i found this post, i guess i am not the only one to still search about it. This software is opensource. For now i didn’t test it but my purpose was to connect Woocommerce to SuiteCrm, which doesn’t work actually i think. If someone try it it would be nice to have some feedback about it. http://www.myddleware.com/solution/connected-applications