If we learned one good thing from our agency survey (and really, we learned a lot!), it’s that we could all stand to find out more about the capabilities of our online ordering system (and an upgrade wouldn’t hurt either).  One respondent commented:

I would love to see the product list revised.  I’m sure there are many others, besides myself, who seldom order from the “purchased products” selections.  It would be much more efficient for me if there were two separate lists, one of the items I can get inexpensively and the other of the pricier items.

Well, we’re not going to make two separate lists – but we will tell you how you can get something of the same effect from all those drop down menus at the top of the ordering window:

You can choose to view product by their storage needs (in the first drop down), by product type (in the second drop down), and by category (in the third drop down).

Let’s break that down a little bit more: storage options are dry, refrigerated, and frozen. Type is the longest list: it uses headers like cereal, fruit, grains and so on.  Category is where you can distinguish purchased product, because “category” is about where the food comes from.

There are enough other categories that you might not want to look through them one at a time; your next best best is to use the fourth drop down, “Sort by,” to identify whatever aspects matter to you – could be storage, could be type – and if it’s purchased you care about, be sure to include category as one of the sorting choices.

Whatever drop down choices you make, you will have to click on the “Apply” button before the changes take effect; that action will make the list refresh automatically with your new settings.

Have another question about online ordering or a neat trick to share? Send your suggestions for this series of posts to eliannab@feedingamericawestmichigan.org.

Edit: If you don’t want to bother with using the drop down menus, you can always rely on the fact that the item numbers for purchased products start with a ’6′ (and for that matter, USDA products start with an ’8′).