New commerce site

[adrianh]

I need to rework one of my sites and hope you can help me. My needs are straight forward, items will be sorted into categories and sub categories. Each item could have various sizes, colors and be made from various materials. The issue is that the final price is looked up based on Product code, size and material. I suppose the Size and Material fields could be multipliers rather create lookups.

Any thoughts on which tool to use.

[Mark Atkinson]

Eish - that's not going to be an easy setup using any system. I know that it can be done using Virtuemart - it's not straightforward though.

[adrianh]

I can set it up in OsCommerce but it has to be done as follows:

This has to be done for each product

Product price
size 1 +Rvalue
size 2 +Rvalue
size 3 +Rvalue
material 1 +Rvalue
material 2 +Rvalue
material 3 +Rvalue

The thing is that I have 100 products that have the same Size and Material pricing attributes. If I were to change my pricing structure I would have to revise each option in in product.

What I need is for the options to be defined seperately from the products and then to be associated with each product.

Size Option 1
opt 1 xRvalue
opt 2 xRvalue
opt 3 xRvalue

Material Option 1
opt 1 xRvalue
opt 2 xRvalue
opt 3 xRvalue

I now need to be able to associate
Product 1
Size Option 1
Material Option 1

Product 2
Size Option 1
Material Option 1

I can't think that this should be too difficult to do. Imagine a company that sell bolts and nuts

Standard products would be say "hex machine screw" and multiplier options would be "length" and "material". There would be no sense in setting the prices up as a matrix.

[Norri]

Drupal Ubercart works like this. I would use that because a) I'm familiar with it and b) it does what's needed in this case.

However, installing Drupal & Ubercart to work well is not easy if you do it separately. Instead, I recommend you use the following install profile. It will make your life SOOOO much easier: http://drupal.org/project/uberdrupal

This if Drupal 6 by the way. It's very stable but it's not the latest version of Drupal. That would be the 7.x branch but you can upgrade later.

If you like, I can set this up for you and run it on my e-commerce hosting for R499pm. That includes the initial set up and loading of all your products and options.

(The R499pm covers the initial set up - so there's no setup fees but, if you cancel, you don't get to take the installation with you but you do, of course, keep your data such as products, images, etc. This is to stop folk from signing up, getting all the free stuff, and then buggering off. So you basically "licence" the use of the Drupal installation we set up for you.)

[Norri]

Oh and there's no contracts - if it doesn't work for you, you lose just R499 but, like I said, you don't get the code + database if you cancel.

[adrianh]

hmmm...I currently do my own hosting in the US for $7 per month. I run 4 of my own sites on Joomla and OsCommerce. It's just very time consuming to set this up on OsC. I did some research into ZenCart and it can do what I need. I'm going to install ZenC in parallel on one of my Osc sites and see how it works out.

[Norri]

If you know what you're doing, then my e-Commerce hosting won't help you. It's for people who don't know where to begin and don't want to faff with the technical stuff.

However, if you'd like to have me set up the basics for you, let me know and we can work out a fee just for the installation + setup. PM me or email me

[adrianh]

I've installed Zen-Cart and also OpenCart. None of them are able to do exactly what I need. Damn, now to figure out how to code in PHP and change OpenCart to do what I need. It doesn't seem too difficult consindering all the time I spent coding in Delphi...Its just another mind_f.....to get the feel for it..

[Mark Atkinson]

I've installed Zen-Cart and also OpenCart. None of them are able to do exactly what I need. Damn, now to figure out how to code in PHP and change OpenCart to do what I need. It doesn't seem too difficult consindering all the time I spent coding in Delphi...Its just another mind_f.....to get the feel for it..

You might be better off just paying a freelancer at elance.com to do it for you.

The time you're going to spend wrapping your head around PHP and how OpenCart uses it will likely be way above the monetary spend involved in hiring a freelancer.

[adrianh]

Hmmm...You know, if I had the feature that I need then I would be able to cut the number of data points down from 22 x (127 now could go up exponentially) to 22 + (127 now could go up exponentially) the reason is that each item has 22 options but those options are the same for all items. I'm doing it by catagorizing the data and then creating a data matrix in Excel to be upoaded into openCart. Of course that also comes with its own set of issues.

PHP is just one part of the problem, the other is to determine all the points in OpenCart that need to be modified..I'd hate to miss the billing bit :-)

[Mark Atkinson]

Quick question, have you searched for plugins/extensions that might do what you're looking for?

[adrianh]

I have yes, I have'nt foud any that can do exactly what I need. What I need seems to be a fairly common request, most people end up doing it by using a matrix in categories updated from Excel

[Stromberion]

The first wave of e-commerce was built around the functional. Amazon, CDNow and others succeeded in putting the basic shopping experience online. It was hard enough for sites to translate our mouse clicks into packages that we’d receive, with all of the attendant systems, workflow and business processes that needed to be put into place. It was hard and expensive to get basic e-commerce order and fulfillment, and their attendant business processes, in place. At Live365, we spent more than a year and burnt more than a $1 million in 1999 building an online store to sell CDs. One could have the same front-end functionality today for $99 a month using Shopify. Ouch.