I'll try to describe this as best I can.
What would be extraordinarily helpful is to have a way for us as the store owner to have access to using the website to actually take orders over the phone. We get a lot of phone orders from folks who can't or don't use the internet. Ideally, we'd have our own custom view of the online store.
I know what you're thinking. Why not just access the regular web store and process the order through that? Good question. That's because we publish a magazine and print ads for our products in the magazine. A lot of our readers go to order merchandise by phone (or snail mail) from those ads. And because we never know what combination of products a customer might order, we just have to estimate shipping costs so we can publish them in the ads. If we had our own "corporate" view of the store my hope is that it would allow us to override certain settings, like shipping, for instance. Instead of the site automatically figuring shipping based on what's in the cart, we could put total shipping at $5.00 (or whatever the ad had said the shipping would be), and process the customer's order.
Sorry, I feel like I'm struggling to say this clearly. Here I go: A customer store as we already have, AND an in-house store that we have a bit more control over so we can process phone and mail orders.