I'm working on a store that has two types of products: perishable food and general merchandise. The food must always be shipped overnight via FedEx, and the other merchandise must always be shipped via USPS. If somebody orders products from both categories, they must be shipped separately.
Do you know of an existing module or configuration settings that would allow for this?
If not, it sounds like a custom module would be the other solution. In this case, what is the best approach? I'm thinking it would be splitting the order into a multi-address shipment, using the same address for both but with different shipping methods. Unfortunately I'm not sure how to do this programatically, so any tutorials/samples/resources would be greatly appreciated.
Probably the sanest way to handle this would be to create two orders per product type, each shipping with a different carrier to the same address. This also IMO makes more sense from a stores tracking perspective as you can handle each independently from each other.
To get you on the right track(since Magento is especially cryptic in this part of itself) you should read the Inchoo programmatically create order in Magento post and by the same author Programatically create customer and order in Magento with full blown one page checkout.
Basically as I see this going is:
Get the customer order
Itinerate through each product inside the order and split it up in two arrays for each product type
Create a separate order for each product type and use the different shipping methods for each.
You will probably have to extend a some controllers OR do it the non-standard way and use helper functions for this, the hard parts will be integrating the payment/shipping modules inside your order process. Going this way will have you creating the full checkout process as the one page checkout Magento provides won't really work and is too much pain to get to work because of the way it uses AJAX.
Also another alternative is to hook in to Magento's pre-create order events and create the orders there using already defined order data split it up in two orders, but this is something I never heard or saw implemented at the moment so you'd have to do it "blindfolded" so to speak.
An easier approach would be to use a custom field that defines your product's shipping method, this way you just add that and don't care about custom orders. You just react with that, however tracking will become mostly impossible IMO.
Over-ride the Free Shipping module.
You can setup a sales rule that applies to certain products and makes them 'Free Shipping', leaving the other products to your chosen main shipment provider.
You will need to see how this works, however, the point is that Magento does have something built in to split an order into two shipping categories, albeit only a sales rule on free shipping. But you have source code...
Related
I am a shopify partner, I am trying to get around the the variant limits of shopify by coding an app and also because my client has a complicated formula for calculating the price. I don't have a problem with the part that adds the information for my variants to the order, however when I want to modify the price based on the user selection, it doesn't seem an easy task to do.
I came across couple of apps which does the same thing by adding a new product or variation which is not optimal for my use case, is there any app that does the job without adding extra information to the database, if so, how?
Qualified Yes
Unfortunately, Shopify doesn't give us a lot of options to edit prices of items dynamically. Here are the two options that I know of that will allow you to adjust the price of a product directly - however, both have limitations.
Using Shopify Script Editor
If you're working with a Shopify Plus merchant, you can use the Shopify Script Editor to dynamically adjust the prices of products, provided that the direction you adjust is down. You cannot increase the price of a product using the script editor - so for your use case, the list price would have to be the most expensive possible price that the item sells for, which you would then discount appropriately using the app.
Using draft orders
Using an app, you can use Shopify's Draft Order API to create an order with custom discounts and/or create completely custom items that are independent of the products set up in the product database.
The basic flow for this is that when the customer clicks 'checkout' you halt the normal navigation, send the cart contents to your app, create a draft order with the appropriate pricing, then supply the front-end code with the draft-order checkout/invoice URL so that you can send the customer there instead of the normal checkout. This has several limitations, however, including that prices of existing products can only be discounted, not increased, and the fact that Shopify will not allow a customer to use discount codes on a draft order invoice - once an order is set up this way, Shopify's assumption is that all prices are final.
Disclaimer: Sorry if someone sensible doesn't like a response with a link :) I'm not related to this app I'm just a user.
On a project with complex pricing, we use the app Wholesale Pricing Discount by Wholesale Helper we liked because is easy to import multiple pricing by-product and relate it by customer.
this app does not multiply the products, they use customer tags. maybe that can give you some guidance.
An important rule on Shopify is you can't increase the price by API on an order, you can just reduce i
I have to integrate my webshop with an external system. This system provides several functionalities, described in their API. This is what I want to do:
Import/sync products (this is available as CSV via request)
Update stock of products (also available as webrequest)
So I have to hook into the Magento stock check and I want some script which updates the products like everyday.
Where should I implement my changes? What is the best way to do this? I can imagine Magento already have some API stock functionalities, but can`t seem to find the right documentation.
Thanks in advance!
Firstly you could use the Magento web service via either SOAP and XML-RPC:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/introduction.html#Introduction-SOAP
There's an API for updating stock levels:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/api/soap/catalogInventory/cataloginventory_stock_item.update.html
However, this is usually quite slow and can take some time to update large collections of products, in which case you are better going for a solution which uses the Magento object model directly, or something custom.
Depending upon your level of development expertise there's a few options available. One library to checkout is Magmi:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/magmi/index.php?title=Magmi_Wiki
this is useful for updating lots of product data / stock levels quite quickly.
If you do no require an automated solution, you could always use the standard Magento import/export profiles to import stock levels from a CSV file, a quick search for 'Magento Import Export Profiles' should give you a good starting place:
http://www.seenbest-web-design.com/techclub/importing-a-csv-of-products-to-magento/
http://www.woolleydesign.net/2011/02/updating-store-inventory-in-magento/
I am fully functionally using Magmi now. I have written a plugin to automatically create configurable products, so if anyone is ever interested let me know.
There is already a plugin to process configurable products, my plugin is dependent on that plugin.
Basically, you will only be able to create configurable products if you especially have added this to your CSV, with a column named 'type'. In the column type you can set simple or configurable. With my module that won`t be nessecary. By some logic I automatically recognize the simple products and create a new configurable containing those products.
A little explanation on why I need this:
The stock system of our client updates a list of product (CSV) every few hours, containing entries of products. They sell clothing, and every size, and every color is a new entry. So one product can have 10 entries, entry 1: t-shirt green, size 12; entry 2: t-shirt green, size 13, etc.
I explain this, just in case anybody would ever need something like this, my plugin will probably help you. It will although need a few modification for your situation, since this is very specific to how your list of products is composed.
Anyway, thanks for your help!
A client of mine has a service-oriented ecommerce site on Shopify and he's asked me to assist in making a few changes. I've never utilized the service so I'm not really familiar with it.
The price list was static at first since the client used the same vendor however now that they're growing - and therefore using multiple vendors - the costs are fluctuating and therefore the prices on Shopify need to reflect that.
I need to set it up so that when a customer logs on a vendor is programmatically chosen based on their geographic location and the prices (shown to the customer) adjust accordingly.
Is this possible? And if so, what objects/API docs should I be looking at. I seems as if I can easily hard code this with IF statements but I'd like this to scale cleanly so I'm looking for a more efficient solution.
I think this should be possible. Based on your comment:
Will I not have a zip code for the customer? – RyanMac
The easiest way would be to create a Product Variant for each region. Based on the customer.default_address you could find the customers ZIP code. Next step would be to use this within the product.liquid template to select the correct variant.
The biggest problem you have is determining their location. When a customer logs in, you know who they are, so you could dish out only products of interest to them. Problem is, how do you lump people into those regions? You have your work cut out there. When you create a customer you can assign them any code you want, so perhaps you could just match customers to vendors using a match on that. Lump any customers into GroupA and you show only products with Vendor GroupA, any customers assigned to GroupB render products from vendor GroupB....etc
I am thinking of modifying the authorization feature of Prestashop, wherein multiple shops can share customers even when shops are not within the same group. For example, when a customer logs in the default shop, after checking out his cart he can go to the next shop without the need to relogin again. More convenient for the customers, I think.
My question is, will that pose any security threat or any other disadvantage to my shops and to my customers? As of now I can't think of any, but I want to know the point of view of PS experts first before I dive into the codes.
And btw, if I am to start editing my shop, is there any method that I can use so that I dont need to edit the core codes?
Use prestashop's override if you really need to change core
http://doc.prestashop.com/display/PS15/Overriding+default+behaviors
Soon I'll be working on a project that amounts to what is essentially an e-commerce app for configured products. This question is about ways to implement pricing schemes that can change from day to day, so we want to get the pricing logic out of code and into a database, but not in a way that causes the database to do all the work.
The basic idea is this, there are 5 attributes. You pick an option from each of those attributes. Then you start adding products to your cart. All the product you add will have those 5 attributes tacked onto them (the attributes will affect the pricing). Once you've added a product, you can apply modifications to it (the attributes will also be applied to the modifications).
So, what we've got at this point is a product (which has a fixed base price) with some information about it (that will modify the price), and zero or more modifications (which has a fixed price) and some information about them (which will modify the price). Modifications can also incur additional charges. For instance, if company A uses this software and they price their items using: BASE_PRICE + $50 * NUM_WHIRLIGIGS and the item has a modification that adds a WHIRLIGIG, that will have to be reflected in the price.
Do you know of any examples of different pricing systems that I might find useful when determining how to set this up? Do you have better ideas?
My current best thought is below, you can skip it if you're not curious about the particulars of the method and just want to get right to the answering!
For any given item (or collection of items) the company could use a special interface to set up pricing formulas which would then be interpreted and evaluated at run-time.
So for PRODUCT_A, the company might put in something like BASE_PRICE + WHIRLIGIG_UPCHARGE * NUM_WHIRLIGIGS. And the software, when it comes time to price it, would look at how many WHIRLIGIGS the item has, as well as how many WHIRLIGIGS are added by any modifications.
Does anyone have experience implementing this kind of interpreter? How did it turn out? Was it difficult/troublesome?
Thanks in advance for all the awesome input I'll sure I'll get. :P
Typically, this is usually handled with product bundles which have components. So a product with 5 additional subcomponents would not be base + 5 * addon, but SUM(base, addon, addon, addon, addon, addon).
So your product table may either be self-referential or there is some kind of link table which says which sub-products are allowed to be attached to which products.
In my experience, pricing is usually stored on a product/customer or contract basis, so that's another table.
Then the actual orders themselves contain product bundles. If the order is a quote, then the pricing is frozen (up to the expiration of the quote).
When an quote or order is turned into an invoice, at that time the pricing is either locked in from the main pricing or the quote, depending upon the pricing timing paradigm.