I'm thinking of switching to the Shopify platform, and I had a question regarding product bundles. Currently, customers are able to purchase bundled items on my website that are items composed of other items within the assortment. For example, customers can buy a bundle item that's a monitor, keyboard and CPU as one set. Within the product catalog the bundle is it's own individual SKU. However, customers can also buy just the monitor as a separate item. In each scenario the monitor has it's own SKU as well as the bundle. However, when a customer purchases this item instead of reducing the inventory by one bundle, we actually reduce the inventory by each of the SKUs in the bundle. So if a customer purchases a bundle, the stock of the monitor, CPU and keyboard are each reduced by one. Essentially, the bundle is acting as a ghost item online and in the backend we're actually just working with the individual SKU's that compose that item.
I've seen multiple bundeling apps on Shopify, but none that address this need. Does anybody know of an app that would support this functionality? Or is there native functionality within the shopify platform that would support this?
I built an App many years ago that does exactly this. You create a product with infinite inventory composed of X other products, give it a price, and sell it as a bundle. When the order is booked, the App updates the individual product inventory levels, and all is well.
The main problem no one has ever solved with this (short of using an expensive Enterprise inventory management approach) is that it is not possible to not have the occasional oversell on inventory. Shopify only checks inventory for managed products, and bundles have no management. So if you are not concerned with inventory management at the point a customer moves from cart to checkout, this kind of App is good enough for you. Otherwise, you need to spend $$$ on Enterprise level code.
Does anybody know of an app that would support this functionality?
I believe there are quite a few apps that support this now. Our App supports it via the 'Synchronize Inventory' task: Products Assistant
Related
I have described requirement flow using diagram http://creately.com/diagram/example/ifrthu1k1/Flow. I need help in figuring out which app helps in fulfilling my requirements.
In brief my requirement goes like this:
Our system contain multiple cities
Each cities can have one or more Central Distributed Center (CDC)
Each CDC will have one more Districuted Center(DC)
Each DC will serve customers belong to one or more regions identified by Zipcodes.
Each DC will have some set of products.
product mangement in inventory is done using barcode scans. (Good to have feature)
Inventory(for DC) planning - which product sold more/less. (Good to have feature)
Easily diffrentiate expired product.(Good to have feature)
This is a bit of a cart before the horse situation. What you really need is some sort of fulfillment management system. Usually this is part of your ERP (something like Intacct, Netsuite, or SAP) but for smaller businesses with fulfillment being handled by a 3PL you might need to integrate orders with that instead. Once you have a fulfillment management system in place you can integrate that with Shopify via the Shopify API to update Shopify's inventory and allocate Shopify Orders to the appropriate fulfillment center.
So the steps would be:
decide how you are going to manage the accounting and fulfillment side of your business.
Integrate that system with Shopify.
we have created a publishing platform that is similar to Zinio,
We have a website where we upload magazines, and publish them to our mobile App on iPad
Apple is rejecting the App for the following reason:
Apps that use IAP to purchase items must assign the correct Purchasability type We found that the Purchasability Type for one or more of your In App Purchase products was inappropriately set, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.
Your In App Purchases are set to Consumable.
However, based on product functionality, it would be more appropriate to use the Non-Consumable In App Purchase type. Non-consumable products are only purchased once by users and are always available on all devices that are associated with that user's iTunes account.
We have Replied and Explained them Several Times the following:
We are using consumable type of in-app products since we have a lot and frequently released magazines with different prices therefore we cannot define the purchases to be non-consumable.
We have set pricing Tiers from $0.99 until $54.99 so that each magazine will be classified appropriately and assigned to a certain Tier.
our system has a lot of magazines where each one has many issue releases. Magazines issues are sold within an offer.
We have "single issue offers" (offers containing only one magazine issue) and "multiple issues offers" (offers containing multiple isses, eg: get 3 digital issues of magazine x for $19.99).
We are using the Tiers from 1 to 55 to assign prices for our offers. Note here that the in-app purchases are consumable but our system won't let the user buy an already purchased item another time.
The application will contact our server each time when the user attemps to buy an offer.
If the offer is already bought, the application won't proceed with the in-app purchase and the user will be shown that he has already bought that offer.
Anyone has an answer to solve this problem?
As apple is insisting that we should not use consumables and use non-consumables which is not logical, as we need to be submitting the app every time magazines has been added to the system.
Help is Much Appreciated
For magazines, you are unlikely to get consumable in-app purchase ability from Apple. They've made it clear in the past that the expectations for media, levels, and content of this type are expected to be present on all of the users devices.
However, based on your description of what you are trying to do, I'm not sure that this is a problem. Remember that consumables are not the same as subscriptions, in that a subscription gives you access to potentially more than one issue, whereas a consumable just means that is something that may not be available after you purchase it, I.e. that it might be consumed.
It sounds like the real problem here is a catalog issue. For episodic content, such as magazines, you don't want to hard-code your in-app purchases, instead look at the server-based model, as described in:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ipad/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/StoreKitGuide/APIOverview/OverviewoftheStoreKitAPI.html
With this model, your server can return a list of product identifiers that meet certain criteria, so you don't have to constantly update the app.
I have been tasked with selling made-to-order products online. We have a web-based product configurator and order processing system set up that produces prices, interfaces with our inventory system, etc.
I've reviewed Magento and Ubercart and they appear to do too much; the management perceives integrating something like that as an unnecessary abstraction from what we already have going. In addition, our pricing structure is arranged in such a way that it would be an overwhelming task for me to extend the pricing system in a feature-rich ecommerce platform.
I need to be able to send an arbitrarily generated product description and price to a cart and then have it handle the sale checkout and secure payment gateway headaches.
Is there anything out there that allows that?
I ended up going with a fairly-basic Drupal site and rolled my own very-basic cart module.
what are the must have functionalities for an e-commerce web shop?
e.g.
unlimited categories and sub categories
multiple categories per product
multiple product images
product consumer ratings and comments
payment gateway integration
delivery service integration
Best Sellers
Newest Products List
discount facilities
promotional facilities (buy one get one free)
I know we shouldn't just link to elsewhere, but this link is within stackoverflow. I'll just quote it all here:
Do you need to build one at all? Most of this has been done for you in
various shopping cart packages
including google checkout,
oscommerce, and others, but if
you must take the plunge try to at
least think about the following...
Secure session for users
Storing 'items' in the cart via the session / cookies
Payment processing
what external systems do you interface with
what kinds of payments do you accept
what currencies do you accept
Some kind of dispatching system for when a purchase occurs
If a purchase occurs, who is notified to mail out the items?
where is the purchase logged?
Interaction with an inventory system of some sort
is the item in stock?
what to do when out of stock?
Total / shipping calculations
how much do you charge shipping for different customers/destinations
where do you want to ship / where will you not ship
A shopping cart is far more complex a
concept than it appears to be. The
specific answer to these questions
will depend on what kind of
organization you are working for. Big
company? Small startup? Family
business? High volume vs low volume?
Etc.
I'm looking into building a web app that allows multiple e-commerce stores to coexist on the same installation and lets allows each individual vendor manage their own products, pricing, sales reports, etc. I know that there have been a number of previous questions on the Stack regarding the best shopping cart software, but this is a bit of an unusual twist and I couldn't find it answered elsewhere.
Obviously, open source is better from a pricing standpoint, but I've got no problem with spending money on a quality product that meets my needs. The ideal package would allow each store to be uniquely skinned, would minimize the amount of time that it takes to get a new store up and running, and would include payment gateway and shipping integration.
I've run across a few things in my scouring of the web, but haven't found "the one" yet--I know that osCommerce sort of supports what I'm trying to do, but I'm looking for something designed with this functionality in mind. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Justin
I am at present looking into the same thing. After looking at all the different cart on the market I have settled on PHP Mall 2. I have had demos of X-Cart Pro, iscripts multicart and a few others.
There were only 2 that were any good at handling payments direct from buyer to seller without any added costs of have a mod done for that. They were PHP Mall 2 and iScripts Multi cart. iScripts Multicart didn't really have alot happening in the backend, and vendor shops were really just an about us page with their products showing.
I settled for PHP Mall 2 becuase each vendor can have their own website as such and can customise it to the way they want it. They can choose from a number of templates for their shop.
The part I really like about it is the payments system, there are a number of payment gateways out of the box and the vendor can choose which ever he/she wants. (because not everyone use paypal right!). Its also a fair bit cheaper than all the others and provides alot more from a site admin and seller admin side of things.
I was tasked with looking into a multi vendor cart for a project that was canceled. Before it got canceled, I felt that the below were strong contenders. This is not a comprehensive list but it's somewhere to start. The requirement for multi vendor was paramount, so the listed have varying amounts of CMS/blogging etc; so they are not necessarily apples to apples.
I did get to try out magento community and using information found here http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/145/ got what I felt was the correct experience for multi store/vendor for my purposes. Mileage may vary depending on requirements. It's a beast though and for some reason comparison doesn't indicate the multi vendor capabilities. My impression was that Magento was definitely for the technically minded, with a very high degree of configurability available. It's a meta system for sure. The average joe business owner wouldn't stand a chance with it. However, it might be a perfect for resellers.
http://www.x-cart.com/mall_solution.html
http://www.php-shop-system.com/products/iq-cart-for-joomla-our-new-cart-component-for-joomla.html
http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/compare
I am also in search of a multi-store solution. Magento Commerce is too expensive. OpenCart now supports multi-shop but only a single user can manage the stores. I would have preferred setting up multiple stores and have different users manage each store.
I've also been undertaking research within this area and discovered the following options;
For joomla = http://www.ijoobi.com, IXXO
For Magento = http://www.unirgy.com, MVDE
There is also an interesting product called MultiCart from iScripts, and the X-Cart Pro from Qualiteam.