If you're running a small business or you just want to sell something, one of the tedious parts is handling all sorts of orders from customers. Sometimes, things don't work as you would expect, and you're kind of stuck and don't know what to do.
You might be thinking about leveling up by collecting all these orders you're receiving and putting them down on a spreadsheet. Everything works fine until you reach a point where you feel something is missing or there are redundant orders and human validation errors. At that time, you realize you're wasting your efforts and time once again.
Despite your determination, you might try using some online tools that initially help you, like Google Forms, perhaps because it's free. However, it's not that flexible, and you can't fully integrate it with your business. You need to consider things like inventory count and item management.
Then you think, "I probably need a website to handle all this stuff." After hours of searching on the internet, you might come across pay-and-play solutions like Shopify. However, the charges are exorbitant for a small business like yours. Then you come across WordPress with a plugin called WooCommerce, along with premium themes from ThemeForest. It's a great deal; you choose the most affordable hosting and domain, and you're done. Your website looks impressive with all the parallax effects and enhanced slider features.
But again, a few months later, all these things don't help your business much. Your customers hate using your website because it's challenging for them to fill out the forms just to buy a single product. You're trapped with all the configuration, taxes, and stock management. There are simply too many of them, and you feel overwhelmed.
Moreover, as you go along, you realize that features like wishlists, commenting, and other unrelated functionalities are unnecessary for your business operations. You're not a Steam store where these things greatly assist customers. Worse, these additional features make your website slower, pushing all the resources to their limits.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying WordPress and WooCommerce are bad. Even this website is running on WordPress.
Then consider this:
All the above is what I faced, except for the Google Forms part. If you're experiencing the mentioned problems, you might want to consider SwitchX. I built it myself using a framework called Laravel. You know, I've dedicated a lot of time to learning Laravel, so there's no need to doubt its quality.
So basically, SwitchX is developed based on "what's important for the operation of a small business." The operation of a small business isn't that complicated.
Here's how it works:
- You have your products ready.
- You put the details on the website.
- The customer fills out the order form.
- You send the item through PosLaju.
- You update the status.
- The customer reads the status and checks the PosLaju tracking.
- There's more to it, but I think you get the idea.