Contact Lens Store

[BroknSpyrl]

Alright, I've been asked to develope the web site for my company, and my boss recommended osCommerce as my shopping cart solution. I have been searching all day for an easy way to add about 300 contact lens brands, and their minimum of 3, maximum of 7 options each. Also, each option can have up to 80 some values. Is there an easy way to add all of this data to my database, and have it appear in osCommerce properly? So far, I can only see the ability to have TWO options per product, which isn't nearly enough. I'm not an expert in PHP, and I want to get this project done as soon as possible. I'm thinking within a month or so. I'm sure I can load the data to MySQL en masse with little problem. But how do I get it to show up in osCommerce?

 

Any help would be of great benefit, even if you just tell me to find another shopping cart solution.

 

Thanks.

[FalseDawn]

OSCommerce is not limited in the number of options you can have for a product.

 

I would warn you though, that as the number of options increases, the number of database queries increases quite alarmingly on the shopping cart page, which could slow things down somewhat.

 

Have you looked at the "easypopulate" contribution? You might be able to butcher this to fit your needs...

[FalseDawn]

Also, if you need to have stock control at the product option level, OSC is no good - it only checks stock for the top-level product.

 

This may or may not be an issue depending on exactly what options you provide and how you intend to fulfil the order.

[BroknSpyrl]

Would have liked inventory tracking by option, but, I can just do that in the back office application. I'm not sure if this is going to work out. May have to do it from scratch. This will take longer than I had hoped. Thanks for the advice though, I will keep working with osCommerce, to see if we can use it for something.

[BroknSpyrl]

I think I've found what I need with an osCommerce child package. It's called Zencart. Seems to be more geared toward the PHP novice, with more GUI admin functions. Thanks for the help.

[Jeremy at oddly enough]

I use excel to write scripts of SQL commands to load my products and their attributes into the database directly. Once you have a look at the tables, and see where all the info is supposed to go, and how it relates it's not too difficult to put a lot of info in pretty quickly.

 

Jeremy