What if one of your products has a recall? You need to find each of your customers who ordered that product and send them a notice. What if you have hundreds of thousands of orders?
This was exactly the situation one of our clients found themselves in recently. It was their first ever recall, and so nothing was built into the system to handle the situation. There are only a few options:
- Email all of your customers about the recall. Not ideal, because most of them don't need to see the email, and it would be a massive blast that could get your server flagged as spam.
- Open every order between a certain date, one by one, and see if it included one of the recalled products. This isn't really an option, but here so that there are three items in this list.
- Run a custom SQL report. This is feasible, but complicated. A typical store admin is not going to be able to write the somewhat complicated query necessary for this. And it wouldn't be easy for them to repeat, in case another recall for a different product came up in the future.
Thankfully, their store runs on Drupal Commerce, which allows for some quick agility, so there was another option, detailed below.
We created a View page of order line items, that displayed the Order ID the line item belonged to, and the email address of the customer. We then created an exposed filter where they could enter an SKU for a product. They would then see every single order, with the customer's email, that contained the product. Clean and easy.
But one of their products was fairly popular, and so over 750 people had ordered it. Copying and pasting that many email addresses from a webpage is not ideal. So, using the Views Data Export module, we made it so they could export all the email addresses into a CSV file, so they could do a mail merge.
All in all, this took less than 40 minutes to implement. And it is a page they will be able to use again, if needed. Not one line of code or SQL was written.
This is just one, small example of the power of Drupal, and how big of a difference it can make.
