Over my head and out of my mind

[chemlabrat]

I own a brick and mortar online store and decided to make the move to online sales to supplement my income. I've come a long way from where I was with understanding how it works, and am just now realizing I'm in over my head.

 

I have a website set up, with oscommerce installed on it and a couple of simple contributions. I have the template formatted how I want it to look for my store. I have accounts set up with distributors of products I intend to sell. These distributors all provide a "data dump" via an excel file or text file.

 

I'm to the point now of actually trying to figure out the mechanics of how it all ties together. I need to be able to take the multiple data dumps from my distributors and create a continually up-to-date retail storefront based off it. I need a way for customers to be able to make payments via credit card or paypal (I already have a merchant account with my brick and mortar store that I can punch in mail order sales on). I need the shipping module to be at least somewhat accurate, which I'm not sure where to start on since I'm sure the data dump from the distributors is not going to include weight, size, etc.

 

I'm really clueless with most of the mechanics of oscommerce.

[Jack_mcs]

For your main problem, if you are getting a data feed from your distributor, the easiest way to handle it is to install the Easy Populate contribution and convert the feed to match it.

 

Asking for paid help in the forums is not allowed so you won't getting any replies online, or they will be deleted if you do. There have been many posts on how to get help though so a search like this may help.

 

Jack

[MrPhil]

Note that if you already have a merchant account for mail-order and/or in-store purchases, read the fine print very carefully. It will usually tell you that you can not use that merchant account for e-commerce, and need to set up a new one with different terms and fees.