multiple sites & payment needs

[eoptica]

Hi everyone,

 

My developer is recommending osCommerce for our growing e-commerce needs. We've had a few difference on-line projects in the past few years and are looking for a way to mix several projects through one account.

 

Essentially we have 3 sites in development with different needs:

 

Site 1: product sales (easy)

 

Site 2: product sales (some from site 1), monthly subscription service (on-line video content)

 

Site 3: digital content sales (<$2 each), monthly subscriptions

 

For Site 3, to avoid unecessary reoccuring merchant fees we'd prefer customers to pay larger amounts ($10-50) into an account and then deduct from that balance per purchase. Further, the product/content would be provided by 3rd party contributors, so we'd need to be able to maintain an active balance for royalties with periodic payouts to the contributors.

 

All 3 sites would be under a parent company that manages the transactions etc. Customers would know that they are dealing with the parent company for everything.

 

I have little experience with actual merchant transactions & DB. Our last two on-line projects included product sales via Paypal and a digital file sales system managed by a 3rd party company (now out of business).

 

Anyway, I'm tossing this out there to see if anyone on this list has any advice for:

 

- sharing one catalog between 2 storefronts

 

- managing multiple storefronts into a singule merchant account

 

- maintaining an active balance for customers & contributors with payouts, etc.

 

 

thnx in advance =)

 

-radley

[eoptica]

Hi everyone,

 

My developer is recommending osCommerce for our growing e-commerce needs. We've had a few difference on-line projects in the past few years and are looking for a way to mix several projects through one account.

 

 

Addendum: we're not developing all three sites at once. Site 2 is already in development with site 1 following shortly after that.

 

For us we're just trying to figure out if OSC can be maintained and used as we progress to site 3... or will we need to move to a custom solution.

 

thnx =)

 

-radley