Customer Accounts / Product Listings.....

[fiscus]

Hi,

 

I have recently discovered osCommerce and I am truley amazed - so much developing, some many mods, support - OSCommerse is OpenSource at it's best.

 

I had been looking at a number of shopping cart systems and was reconmended to have a look at this - I know I wont need to look any further.

 

I have a couple of questions however:

 

From what I have read it is possible to have the one databases feeding mutiple stores (different dirs, same domain).

 

Just to explain what I want to do....we are a clothing maufacturer. We want to display what we call our Core Range online for anything to purchase. This is publically avaliable and anyone can purchase directly for our core range - which is nothing more than a basic / standard products.

 

We have exisiting clients that we offer certain ranges to (whether it be a difference in actual product or simply different colours/fabrics to what is offered in the core range)

 

Is it possible to have a login / password that we give to each client and when they login they can only view (and only purchase) from their specific range.

 

Further to this, is it possible to make sure that when they are checking out that their personal details (ie. Full Name / Contact Number / Store location / Address) can be entered while still being under their single Company account?

 

Any ideas on this?

 

I understand that I could clone our core range store (and add the different product for the specific client range (as well as rebrand for specific company, etc) and they just go to a specific dir - www.clothingshop.com/client1 and www.clothingshop.com/client2 etc. However this is doubling up on alot of things (takes up more space, no single admin sections etc.

 

Any thoughts would be greatly appeciated.

[Emmtee]

basically you'll want to use different "configuration" tables but the same database.

 

to do so, you modify the database_table_name for configuration (located in allplication_top or database_tables) and duplicate the config-table using myPHPadmin (copy to config_shop1 or similar) .... keep in mind that the customer database will stay the same and the orders etc... so this can cause a little bit mixup on processing oders afterwards)

 

one shop will use configuration table1 the other configuration table2 ... etc...

but usually focussing on ONE shop is better than running 5 different with the same stuff... just wastes your resources

[fiscus]

I don't quite understand what you are getting it - can you offer further explanation?

 

Any other ways I can do this?

[fiscus]

Anyone else got information on this?

 

Is there a way to customise the store depending on who logs on? From customising product to customising the look of the store....has anyone been able to do this?

 

Or should I just run seperate store in seperate directories?

[Emmtee]

first think, then ask .... it all depends what you want to do (and how many efforts you want to make to realize it)

 

how should we answer your question properly without having info why and what you want to do (exactly)... the mentioned solution is EASY, it's cryingly simple... but hell, i'm wasting my time here

[fiscus]

As I mentioned we are a clothing supplier/manufacturer.

 

We plan to put a basic set of items on our store for general public purchase. However I want to offer online shopping for out exisiting clients.

 

Out existing client has a specialised product range - whether it be different colours/fabrics or complete different styles as to what is offered in the core range.

 

I want to just run the single store but I want people to get a different range a products depending what the login in as (and ideally different headers - ie. with the clients logo and colours). Instead of running a seperate store for each client I want the offered range to depend on what login is used.

 

How I invisage this is that we have a general shop. In which customers register as normal and login as normal. However if we want to offer a client online shopping I setup a special account (with the clients general details) and all the staff of that client login with the same username and password.

 

When someone logs in with a specific client username/pass they will be take to the shop (but it will have their logo /colours - to distinguish from the general store). The products offered will also be specific to them so they can only order items from their range.

 

Because everyone from the same client will be the same there will have to be a special cheout/shipping module that will allow the specific customers personalised details - ie. what branch/address they need the items deleivered to. I haven't checked the contribution section for a modulke like this but I will get to it when I need to.

 

Atm I want to know if the login account / different range/store issue can be overcome or if it is possible,

 

THanks again.

[Ajeh]

Is this for one group of customers sees all specialized products?

 

Or multiple groups of customers see various or combination specialized products in additional to the normal general public products?

[Emmtee]

As I mentioned we are a clothing supplier/manufacturer.

We plan to put a basic set of items on our store for general public purchase. However I want to offer online shopping for out exisiting clients.

.....

Atm I want to know if the login account / different range/store issue can be overcome or if it is possible,

THanks again.

 

reading your description this sounds like your company has contracts for special fabrics - sold just to one customer.... what you want to do is offer this customer the comfort to order the customized product online.

 

considering that you just need one shop with products that are generally available and products that are limited to one or a group of customers, this sounds like you need an addon-table with the following stucture:

[key product-id] [customer-id]

 

the huge amount of work will be to patch all SQL statements that are listing products....

select ...

WHERE

(

(permissions.product-id = product.product-id)

AND

(

(permissions.customer-id = $session-customer-id)

OR (permissions.customer-id = 0)

)

)

 

this should select all products that are allowed to all customers - ID = 0

or the current customer (either 0 or the corresponding customer-id)

 

... well, i'm still learning about OSC, but IMHO there should be some solution possible to patch the tep_db_query function to auto-add this statements at correct place if products are queried.

 

all then remaining would be to test the shop (don't forget specials and search) whether it hides the products correctly.

 

by adding multiple lines with same product-id and differnt user-id it should be possible to allow a product to a group of people...

 

by removing 0 as uid from the product the product would become private...

 

then just patch the admin (check xsell contrib, that admin has similar functions) to allow you to administrate users-products table :)

(not listing a product at permissions would mean to hide it from anybody)

 

hope this gives you a hint into the right direction

[fiscus]

Is this for one group of customers sees all specialized products?

 

Or multiple groups of customers see various or combination specialized products in additional to the normal general public products?

 

It is for a group of customers seeing specialised products - I'm not quiet sure how this would be defined? IE. have a single account for the client (which would be given to all staff to use and then specific delivery details would be taken at checkout) or have individual accounts which are groupd by clients and then would display the specific range. I imagine the first option would be easier.

[fiscus]

reading your description this sounds like your company has contracts for special fabrics - sold just to one customer.... what you want to do is offer this customer the comfort to order the customized product online.

 

Yes - that is basically it. TO make things clearer we manufacture and supply uniforms and general business attire. The general range is the range that will be offered to everyone.

 

As clients have specific uniforms (fabric, prints, colouts, logos, etc) these can obviously only be supplied to people that belong to that company/client.

 

That way...if we were to create a generic account (username/pass) and when anyone from that company logs in they are only going to be accessing their particular range.

 

Hope this clears some things up.

 

I am still quite new to PHP and Mysql (can pull bits apart but thats about it) so obviously I will need some help if this is going to happen.

 

If there is any further comments / answers please contribute.

 

Thanks Emmtee for the post btw, I can see what you mean - just a matter of working out how to do it.

[Arnoo]

Fiscus,

 

I would be interested to hear how you go with your needs, since I have similar needs. I want to have the one oneline store which can:

- sell our generic products to the public

- sell our generic products (and some different ones too) at different prices to distributors and special customers.

 

I want the products and pricing displayed for different users to be dependent on their login profile.

 

I am new to PHP and MySQL too, and only discovered osCommerce today, so will watch and learn with interest.

 

Andrew

[fiscus]

Fiscus,

 

I would be interested to hear how you go with your needs, since I have similar needs. I want to have the one oneline store which can:

- sell our generic products to the public

- sell our generic products (and some different ones too) at different prices to distributors and special customers.  

 

I want the products and pricing displayed for different users to be dependent on their login profile.  

 

I am new to PHP and MySQL too, and only discovered osCommerce today, so will watch and learn with interest.

 

Andrew

 

That is basically it in a nutshell - One store - One Admin offering different product/price to people based on their login.

[fiscus]

anyone got any more information on this? or is currently using a system like this?

[fiscus]

bump

[shinobiX]

Did you ever find more info on this concept? I have a client who just today asked me for something similar, and I immediately started wondering if there's a way to modify OSC to do it. I suspect many people would be interested in modifying OSC like this. Did you try Emmtee's suggestions? Did it work? Anyone else have any success modifying OSC like this?

 

Thanks in advance!

[shinobiX]

Anyone still out there on this one?

 

It makes sense that you'd need to add couple of fields, perhaps to the product table, or a maybe even a whole new table to the DB(?), but my big question is how to call it from within the admin area (as you're adding/modifying each product), as well as dynamically calling it on the customer side of the shop depending on whether they're logged in.

 

Any insight??