Advice Request: Integration with other shop/e-commerce systems

[coling]

Hello there,

 

First of, I know this is my first post and it is perhaps asking a bit much of the community, for which I apologise in advance.

 

I am a PHP developer of several years, but have not used osCommerce for anything other than very simple out of the box installations for others, and generally have little experience with actually using it myself.

 

However, recently I have had two clients approach me totally separately looking to do pretty much the same thing with an online shop system. Their ideas were very ambitious and full of headaches, not just technical, but social in terms of working with other shop owners. I don't know if osCommerce or any other e-commerce solution has managed to do this, but hopefully someone knowledgable on this board will be able to help me or at least point in the right direction.

 

Essentially what they wanted to do was to create a central online shop, but receive product, price and availability information from multiple sources (other shop installations) and aggregate this information together. A user can browse in the central shop, add items to their cart and checkout. Once payment is received (or authorised pending shipping), the source shop is notified and given details of the items purchased from their shop which allows them to ship the product. Payment is handled centrally and reports of monies due to partner shops could be produced periodically. Some form of price markup system would also have to be employed to allow the central shop to make money (although I suppose a basic discount over the listed amount due per month would suffice initially as a markup, although this would be limiting). Allowance would also have to be made for multiple shipping costs from the different sources.

 

This is similar in principle to Amazon Marketplace, although rather than providing a simple online admin panel for individuals to enter products for sale, it would need automated integration with other shops.

 

I have searched the forums for a while with suitible search terms (aggregation, aggregate, integration, integrate etc.), and while I've found some interesting stuff (especialy multi-stores) none really provide any details as to whether this kind of scenario is supported or planned to be supported. I'm also struggling with finding similar information about other (commercial) shops available, but as an Open Source advocate, supporter and users, I thought this was the best place to ask for help.

 

One thing I would also be interested to know, is there a standard data format (e.g. XML schema) for shops to share infromation about products? Perhaps just a simple RSS system with a bit of formatting overhead?

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this far and thanks even more for any advice you can offer.

 

All the best

 

Col.

[Guest]

This kind of thing is usually done with XML - there are several XML contributions, though nothing as ambitious as you suggest :D

 

Matti

[coling]

Many thanks for your reply Matti.

 

I kinda thought it hadn't been done yet. Too many headaches!!!

 

I guess it would take all e-commerce shop developers to work together to develop a "standard" method of working with each other. I can see how it would work with a combination of XML update feeds which are periodically polled and a webservice/soap style push mechanism for informing remote systems of orders made.

 

In a web service environment, each shop would have to have some form of fallback if the remote shop could not be contacted, either by storing the order and retrying later or rejecting the order completely. If the latter is the case, and multiple remote shops are involved, then you would need some form of "transaction rollback" across the shops it had already communicated with and then of course you get the problem if they are no-longer contactable to cancel what you just setup etc. etc. == mega hassle all round.

 

Anyways, I'm in no position to attempt to start this kind of development just now (as interesting and hair loosing as it would be), so my little babble above is rather pointless :)

 

Still at least I can go back to my clients and say "nah, it's too hard - even the developers of the shop said so, so there :P"

 

Thanks again.

 

Col

[coling]

Just for the sake of reporting back for the sake of anyone else looking for this kind of information, I have found the following on my travels:

 

This product described in more detail here, seems to outline a mechanism similar to what I described above:

The application is also XML enabled with most requests being able to serve XML data directly to XML enabled clients. You can download orders in XML format, get inventory information via XML and even place orders in XML format providing a B2B interface to your store for resellers and corporate customers alike.

 

Now, having looked at the results, I am wholely disappointed by what the application actually produced in terms of a shop (osC is several hundred times better!), but it is this kind of feature my clients seem to be interested in. It does not, however, mention anything about using the XML feeds itself, so presumably it wouldn't be able to be the "central shop" in my examples above anyway, just a shop that fed data to a central shop.

 

It would be nice if this inventory listing and order process were standard mechanisms that every shop could implement, as that would make for a very powerful platform.

 

Hey ho, just thought I'd add info to this thread for the sake of documenting it somewhere, if the board admin would prefer me not to do this, just let me know....