I occasionally hear reports from colleagues who sell products, services, and solutions through the 1shoppingcart.com e-commerce solution that customers place orders, but then they themselves do not receive the Order Notices from the cart system that contain the order details (such as what was sold and where it is supposed to be shipped).

This can be a real problem when order notices are supposed to be copied to a fulfillment house, that isn’t receiving the e-mails, which leads to customers not getting what they ordered.

What usually happens is, these colleagues of mine get a notice from their merchant processor (Authorize.net, PayPal, PayFlowPro, etc.) that something was sold, but that notice doesn’t give the details they need.

There are a number of solutions that you can implement if you ever encounter this problem as a 1shoppingcart.com merchant.

1) Log into your cart and go to Setup >> Orders.

In the “Order Notice Email – Secondary Destination” field, enter an alternative e-mail address of yours that is not hosted by your webhost, such as a Yahoo! or GMail account, and see if you get notices there.

This provides a workaround – not an ideal one perhaps, but one that will usually work well at least.

2) When you receive the transaction notice from your merchant processor but don’t get your shopping cart order notice:

• Log into the cart
• Go to Orders >> Regular Orders
• Find the transaction, then click on the date beside it to view all the details
• You can easily generate a Print-friendly version if you need one

3) Install Alternate Destination Splints on the autoresponders that purchasers of your products get connected to after they buy, that details what product was just sold and who bought it, then, as a reminder to yourself on how to get the shipping details, include the instructions from Step 1 above.

This is a great reason to have every product in your cart attached to its own post-purchase autoresponder.  If you are selling bundle offers, you’ll get a separate notice for each component of the bundle so you know exactly what needs shipped or otherwise fulfilled.

4) Send an e-mail FROM the address where you have configured your cart to receive notices (under Setup >> Orders — the “Order Notice Email – Primary Destination” field) to the “bounce” and “system” e-mail addresses that 1SC uses.  There are usually four or five such e-mail addresses.  (Call their tech support to receive the most current ones as they may change from time to time.)

This will usually help to verify that your Primary Destination e-mail address is indeed a legitimate recipient of mail and trigger 1SC’s mail servers to whitelist it.

If your Primary Destination address is a forwarding alias under your website domain, temporarily turn it into a POP account, send the e-mail, then turn it back into a forwarding alias.

5) Have your webhost and/or mail provider whitelist the IP addresses of 1shoppingcart.com’s mail servers.  There are approximately 30 IP addresses in this list.  Call their technical support department to get the updated list as it is subject to change as they add and retire servers.

Follow these steps and, one way or another, it should solve your issue.  Most of the time, Step #1 of this article solves the issue.

One of the sad realities of e-mail deliverability is that despite every effort to whitelist e-mails and blaze the trail for them to sail into your Inbox, sometimes factors beyond anyone’s control get in the way.

Most of my colleagues manage their e-mail marketing through 1shoppingcart.com or one of its exclusive private label partners, one of the leading e-commerce solutions, and the one I highly recommend.  Some colleagues report that even though they have their system set up to notify them every time someone opts in to one of their mailing lists, they are not getting the notices from the system.

In almost every case I’ve seen, this is because my colleague’s web host was simply not letting the e-mails through.  When we ran tests, we found that the notices would get through if they were sent to an e-mail address under a different domain (such as a Yahoo! or GMail account).  At the same time, these same marketers were loath to enter such an e-mail account in their contact profile, lest the world get a hold of the address.

There is a simple solution to this.  It’s known as the Alternate Destination Split.

To set one up is simple.  Just follow these steps.

1) Log into your shopping cart account, and once in, go to Email & Marketing >> Autoresponders >> Manage Autoresponders

2) From your list of autoresponders, select one where you need to be notified when someone signs up.  In this example, we will call the autoresponder “Mailing List 1″

3) Click on its name to view its Settings, then click the “New Message” button at the bottom of the screen

4) In the new message screen, set up a message with these settings:

• “Days Delay” set to zero
• “Alternate Destination” set to the e-mail address under a different domain where you are able to get notices
• “Subject line” that says “New Subscriber to Mailing List 1 Autoresponder”

Draft a short-but-sweet message that says something like:

A new subscriber has joined the list, Mailing List 1.  Way to be, killer! 

Here are their subscriber details:

Name: %$name$%

E-Mail Address: %$email$%

Alright, time to celebrate.

Chat with myself later,

Me

And then hit “Save.”  Repeat the process for any lists where you absolutely need the heads-up each time you get a new subscriber.  If you want more subscriber data spoon-fed to you, then just add more fields from the Merge Fields menu to the message.

5) Using a webform on your website, opt-in to that list and then a few minutes later check the account where the “Alternate Destination” e-mail will go.  You should receive an e-mail that looks like the above, with the name and e-mail address of the subscriber (in this case, you) filled in.

If you need help with this, just give their tech support a call during business hours and they’ll walk you through it.

Hope that helps!