Tracking orders with SMS
We've touched on a basic order-tracking recipe in Chapter 1, Into the Frying Pan, but this one is going to be a more advanced system. Order tracking is extremely important for any sort of commerce, whether it be e-commerce, call-in orders, or anything that needs a good way to give your customers a way to quickly check their orders.
Making things easy for customers keeps them coming back; having a way for your customers to just text you an order ID and track their purchase at any time is really handy. This system will feature an interface to manage orders, send notifications, and also handle incoming texts asking about orders.
Getting Ready
The complete source code for this recipe can be found in the Chapter6/Recipe5 folder.
How to do it...
We're now going to build a handy order-tracking system. We'll start with the interface to manage orders and continue onto handling requests for order status. We'll also set up a listener file that will accept SMS messages and reply...
