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.
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.
I have been working on import modules for eBay and Amazon. The idea is that if you have an existing storefront at either of these providers, you can import your inventory and sell them at your own custom storefront. The concern I have is, after selling an item on VC, I would have to make sure to adjust the inventory at eBay. And likewise, if an item is sold on eBay, the VC inventory would not be updated until the next scheduled import (perhaps run hourly).
With these concerns in mind, I wonder if I might be going about this the wrong way. Would it be possible for me to author a custom "catalog provider" class, that, instead of retrieving catalog items from the database, would retrieve them real-time via the eBay/Amazon APIs? (Perhaps backed by a cache)
So I guess in summary my question is, is there support/guidance for creating a custom catalog type in VirtoCommerce?
Import/export is a preferred approach for getting a listing data. eBay also provides client alerts https://developer.ebay.com/devzone/client-alerts/docs/Concepts/ClientAlertsAPIGuide.html, which allows you to pull the data every minute about various alerts, like when item is sold. You can use that to get the inventory. So in case it is critical for you to get up to date inventory information, I would use combination of more realtime inventory APIs and import/export.
As of creating an external catalog provider, it is possible but will be much more effort than doing import/export.
Also, we have a parter who is developing integration with eBay/amazon, the project is open source: http://spreadbot.net.
I'm building a marketplace application:
The customer pays the seller on the marketplace
The marketplace takes a cut of the payment
I would have a payment processing system with the following features
The cut and the 100%-cut are sent directly to the marketplace and seller accounts (ie, I don't want to have 100% on the marketplace account and then to forward the 100%-cut to the seller)
I would love to have a UI as much integrated with the marketplace website as possible. This implies that the customer in the worst case has to put only name, surname and credit card number on the payment processor interface (the ideal would be a payment interface totally integrated with our website)
I don't want to force the customer to register to any third party service
It should work nicely with Ruby on Rails
It should work for non US-based companies and should support multicurrency payments
What are the options out there?
Thanks.
I'd recommend you look at our product Balanced. It's built to solve exactly this problem so I think it's a good match.
At a high level payments in are done via credit card like a normal payment processor, funds are deposited into an escrow account which is a sum of all funds collected - all funds disbursed. When you're ready to push funds out you can currently pay out via next-day ACH (US only) but we're building out international support which sounds like it would be useful for you.
I believe it matches your other requirements:
there is no requirement to send users offsite, they do require accounts but you can create and edit them via the API.
Balanced has an excellent ruby gem
You can split up the payment, taking a cut from the proceeds as profit
Balanced provides you with a merchant dashboard for you and your customers to get a head start but you can build the exact same thing via API access.
One area where it's not going to meet your requirements is multi-currency charges. Currently you'll need to charge in USD and convert.
Check out https://github.com/drhenner/ror_ecommerce It doesn't have all the features you want but will give you a big head start.
Basically active merchant will connect to most gateways. You need to add the custom code. Look at the video for more help http://ror-e.com/info/videos/1
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.