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osCommerce

The e-commerce.

Would osCommerce work for my type of site?


derek02

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Posted

Hello all. I am planning a new ecommerce site that will sell artistic items. Each item will be unique as there will not be another like it in inventory. When the item is sold I would like for it's catalog listing to automatically be deleted so another customer wouldn't accidentally order an already sold item. Will I be able to use osCommerce for this without making modifications to the code? I know a little PHP but if I have to make changes to the osCommerce code I'd rather use the PayPal shopping cart and write my own script to handle inventory. Thanks for having a look.

Derek

Furniture factory worker, aspiring millionaire.

Posted

My guess is you should be fine if you set your inventory to 1.

 

I am not sure, but I think the item no longer shows up when it is out of stock, which at that point you could go in and delete the item.

 

You can set something in the admin>configuration>stock area, so when you are out of stock, it won't let anybody purchase if there is inusufficient stock. Again I am not sure if it shows up or not when it is out of stock, but I do know there has been some discussions in the forums about it, so a quick search should answer that question for you.

Posted

Thanks for the suggestions Lee. I will do a search to see if I can come up with anything on this forum. Hopefully I will be able to use osCommerce since in the future I would probably upgrade to a regular merchant account. If anyone else has anything to add please feel free to do so. Thanks again.

Derek

Furniture factory worker, aspiring millionaire.

  • 2 weeks later...
Posted

Hi Derek - i'm in the same boat, I'm creating a site to sell one-of-a-kind items (gemstones). OSC is working within reason, but you'll need to do some php work in order to customize it to your satisfaction.

 

For instance, i had to add some different fields and then go in and add them to the product listings etc.

 

The biggest problem I have at the moment, which I'm either going to have to code for or hopefully someone's already run into it and put up a code snippet: dealing with Checkout and Add to Cart.

 

If you play around and go to View Cart with the item in it, that's fine. Click on the item and it takes you back to the product display page, with "add to cart" at the bottom of the screen. Click on that, and it increments the number of items you wish to buy. But being a one-off item, you get an error message in the Cart telling you to adjust your quantity.

 

This to me is bad -- I want to write a thingy that checks if the item is already in your cart and then change the button to "view cart" or "continue". And get rid of the quantity edit field altogether.

 

Something else which is bugging me, but probably won't be a problem until my traffic and sales get so big I take over the world -- OSC doesn't seem to have a product locking feature. That is, if one person has it in their cart and you come along, OSC still allows you to add that same item to your cart. It's then a race to Checkout to see who can buy the item. I don't really know how big a problem this is, and if you set your Admin options to not allow a stock-out checkout, then you'll be okay. But only time will tell.

 

Hope this helps. If you have any comments or suggestions I'd appreciate hearing, especially if you have a solution for the above problem!

 

FYI I'm using release CVS 5-18-03 with Linda's Shoppe Enhancement Controller. I'm only using about 1/2 of the SEC features though.

 

Good luck!

 

-al

Posted

To me those problems would actually be great. It would mean I'm actually selling stuff. :lol: But I think I can use osCommerce pretty much as is for now until I really do start to get big. Hopefully by then a new version of osCommerce will be out that will address our problems. Thanks for the reply.

Derek Cox

Furniture factory worker, aspiring millionaire.

Posted

Hi halbert (and Derek);

 

I am also going to be offering one of a kind items - my original artwork. My questions are for halbert really. I am just playing with osCommerce to see if it will work for me. I have almost finished customizing the appearance, etc. I agree that the two problems you discussed are not very good but, like you, I don't have throngs of customers as of yet, so it may not be a problem for my store right away. Do you know if the osCommerce Team is aware of these little gliches and is anyone trying to fix them?

 

My real question is, though... what is Linda's Shoppe Enhancement Controller? What does it do? How does it help you manage your shop? And where can one get it from if it's something I'm interested in?

 

Thanks for the thread!

 

Vicky

-----------------

www.roundtablewebdesign.com

www.artbyvicky.com

Posted

Hi to both - actually, I was joking about taking over the world! I'm still in the development phase of my shop and haven't sold anything through it yet. I'm close, but still testing.

 

The problems I listed above are kind of annoying, but I'm not certain *how* annoying they would be to others. So, given that my target market is not likely to be the internet/computer geek crowd, I need to make it as simple as possible.

 

I haven't put these points up to the development team at all, I'm just trying to change the code myself. If it works I'll put up a thread on how to do it yourself, but for now I'm still hunting for a good solution.

 

The Shoppe Enhancement Controller is great!! It's a collection of some 20 or so contributions that Linda has worked on integrating and making more friendly to drop into OSC. Unfortunately it's a work in progress, which means some things still need tweaking and adjustment for your own purposes. But it does a lot of nice things like put "sold" marks on stuff but keeps it in the catalog for others to view, adds a mechanism for nexted categories to display, a view all products module, ability to more than 1 of an item to your cart (though this isn't particularly useful for me!) and so on.

 

Check out her example site at:

http://www.thewebmakerscorner.com/freecall/

 

The thread is in the Contributions forum:

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=46151

 

You need to install it on CVS 2.2 5-18-03 -- you can find links to where you can download that version on the forum.

 

And lastly, you can see my in-development site at:

www.frozenlightning.com/catalog/default.php

 

With any luck it won't be 'development' for much longer!

 

And to make sure you search the forums for your keywords and use "AND" in between them - you'll get better results. I've found a lot of my questions had already been asked, but there's a lot to trawl through!

 

Good luck!

 

-al

Posted

Okay, I found the place where OSC increments the quantity of the item in the cart. Have a look at the case sections after the following line:

 

includes/application_top.php

    switch ($HTTP_GET_VARS['action']) {

 

Change (there's a number of these lines to change):

$cart->add_cart($HTTP_POST_VARS['products_id'], $cart->get_quantity(tep_get_uprid($HTTP_POST_VARS['products_id'], $HTTP_POST_VARS['id']))+($HTTP_POST_VARS['cart_quantity']), $HTTP_POST_VARS['id']);

 

To:

$cart->add_cart($HTTP_POST_VARS['products_id'], $cart->get_quantity(tep_get_uprid($HTTP_POST_VARS['products_id'], $HTTP_POST_VARS['id'])));

 

I only want one item to ever be added of the given item, so I just got rid of the code adding the existing cart_quantity to the quantity to add. This works for me as the shop is set up to add *one* item by default when clicking the In Cart or Buy Now buttons (I've hidden the input field so the customer can't change it).

 

I looked through the forums and haven't found contributions for temporary product locking (that is, when two people see the same item and want to add it to their cart at the same time).

 

There's a couple discussions about this:

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/viewtopic.php...&highlight=

http://www.oscommerce.com/forums/viewtopic.php...ighlight=[/url]

 

I was hoping someone else had done this already, but it doesn't look like it. I'm not really worried about this at the moment, so I'll leave it for now.

 

Good luck! :D

 

-al

Posted

Oops....

 

scratch that last post... I just realized it's not working! :oops: :oops: :oops:

 

-al

Posted

:oha: Okay, the working code is here:

 

Replace:

$cart->add_cart($HTTP_POST_VARS['products_id'], $cart->get_quantity(tep_get_uprid($HTTP_POST_VARS['products_id'], $HTTP_POST_VARS['id']))+($HTTP_POST_VARS['cart_quantity']), $HTTP_POST_VARS['id']);

 

With:

$cart->add_cart($HTTP_POST_VARS['products_id'], $HTTP_POST_VARS['cart_quantity'], $HTTP_POST_VARS['id']);

 

The variable where the cart quantity is held is

$cart->add_cart($prod_Id, $qty, $HTTP_POST_VARS['id'])

 

-al

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