Email a shoppingcart?

[gambot]

Ok first off all, sorry if my english isnt the best.

I dont have a shop, yet... However i'm about to set one up.

 

I already have a problem, or more of a question. I work at a company that doesnt really sell anything to customers. We sell to big retailstores. But alot of end customers call us for spareparts. We got about 20000 parts instock, so its alot... Since we dont like to add them all, and we like to stop sending people free spareparts i had the wish to setup a store for this. It should work like this:

 

1. The customers call us.

2. We add a "sparepart item" to a shoppingcart and setup a price.

3. We email the link to the shoppingcart to the customer, and they place the order.

 

Now to the question: Is there any support for this in oscommerce? The customer should not be allowed to really buy anything else then the cart we send.

 

Thanks!

 

Gambot

[MrPhil]

The most basic approach would be to have a catalog (without prices) and make it available to the public to select items and ask for a quote. I seem to recall osC having an "add-on" or two to not list prices ("Request. Then you would inform the customer, accept payment, and ship, all done "off line" from osC. This assumes that you're not using osC to manage spare part inventories. The next step up would be to use normal osC shopping cart to let the public select items, get the total cost (shipping, taxes), make payment, and arrange shipping; all without your staff having to interact with the customer.

 

Is there some reason you don't want to place a price on all items? It's a lot more work if your staff has to prepare a price quote and talk to the customer and handle payment and shipping. You will run into the same problem as does a store which is selling the same inventory online and in a brick and mortar store -- how do you keep from overselling? Are you able and willing to backorder any part? Do you have sufficient inventory that you can split it in two and move stock as needed between your wholesale customers and retail customers? By the way, some people use osC to sell to both to wholesale customers (the big retail stores) and online retail, with separate pricing and shipping options (and different tax structures). You might look around this forum for discussions on such things. My understanding is that many choose to implement separate stores for the two customer sets, with either some sort of shared inventory, or separate inventories with a quick move from one to the other. That could even be automated, to move stock between two separate databases. It's not built in to osC, but I'm sure it could be put together as an inventory management script that watches for stock getting low on one side, and transfers to that side if there's enough stock on the other side. It could also alert management that it needs to purchase more parts if the total count is getting low.

[gambot]

How about only email someone a shoppingcart? I visit the site, add a few items, send a link to the cart? Any add-ons for that?

 

Thanks

[burt]

Not really an add-on for it but could be achieved in a few lines of code, see http://www.clubosc.com/clear-cart-add-product.html for an overview, but this depends on the product being available at your shop already with an associated price.