Can I do this with oscommerce?

[ramjet69]

Hello,

 

As a software architect I have helped design and develop many a shopping cart. However for this project I would prefer to give a good hard look at oscommerce instead of reinventing the wheel. I think it might be best if I gave my scenario and the community respond versus me telling you what I think I need because there is a good chance I'll be wrong. So without further ado:

 

We have many clients who have ecommerce sites and shopping carts from varying companies. One thing alot of them have in common is that they accept paypal. Now we are making marketing efforts on the clients behalf with purchase incentive (i.e. discount codes) and we need to be able to do two things. One if a person responds to the incentive we would like to wrap that person in our chrome but use the clients store / checkout. Of course after the person has made their selections they need to be able to apply the coupon code to get their incentive. I would prefer that this happen automatically but manual would be acceptable.

So for example if they (the customer) chooses PayPal I would like us to be able to send paypal the coupon code automatically.

 

Second if they make the purchase we would like a way of advising us of the transaction so we can keep track of commision.

 

 

This process is still being worked out so suggestions etc. are gladly welcomed.

 

My question after all that is if oscommerce has this ability or am I asking for something that is so far out it is not even in deep left field?

 

Basically I just want to refer people to a clients site, have them checkout via clients cart, then get notified of the sale. So I see oscommerce in this equation as having the ability to make those interactions natively or through customizations. Remember custom development / extending is something I am comfortable with.

 

I hope this makes sense and if it doesn't please feel free to ask for more information.

 

TIA

JB

[Guest]

@@ramjet69

 

I think you would need to create a new 'wheel' . Although osCommerce can take a customer from product selection to checkout completion using a coupon code, the other capabilities you want would need to be custom coded and to do that, you would be changing a great deal of the core code.

 

So, I suggest you write a custom solution for your clients.

 

 

 

Chris

[ramjet69]

Thank you for the quick response. I kinda suspected this to be the case. To provide a solution for a couple clients while developing this plugin would I be able to install oscommerce as my shopping cart, create inventory that matches exactly the clients, and they would go through the checkout process with coupon on my site except I would use the clients paypal / cc vendor credentials.

 

Thoughts?

[MrPhil]

If all you need to do is be notified that such and such customer used coupon code N, I would think that could be done with a modification to the coupon handling module. Of course, don't be surprised if some stores disable your code, so you don't get notified and you can't collect a commission from the store, or simply block communications with your site! If that might be a problem, you'd have to add something to ensure that the coupon module contacts your site and gets some sort of authorization. I don't know if it would be legal or permitted to have the PayPal interface come through your site, so stores can't bypass you. Again, almost anything you can do in PHP can be gotten around, if the store applies enough effort. I'm not sure osC's license would permit you to encrypt/secure osC-supplied modules using Zend or whatever.

 

An alternative might be an add-on I think I've heard of -- "substores" within your store, where you are the landlord and run the till, but don't necessarily sell things yourself. Then you are responsible for paying the merchants their cut of the proceeds. Or, you simply take the inventory the merchants provide you with and sell it in your store, keeping a commission on the proceeds. The merchants don't have their own stores in this case, which is less work for them, but also less name recognition. They could supply you with CSV files to update merchandise and inventory (use EasyPopulate add-on). Just some thoughts on how you might do this.