FEATURE REQ: Zone related products

[Guest]

Hello people,

I am fairly new to osCommerce.

I currently use an ASP/VBscript based ecommerce solution that I heavily customised.

One major customisation is the ability to have ZONES / REGIONS. Now I see that osC has a zone type system also... but if differs so I will explain what I set up.

 

I will first explain my situation and then put forward a few questions below.

 

The zone / region system I set up on this other commerce software would allow me to link products to zones. I had 10 zones. Some of these were whole countries (like New Zealand - where I am from, USA, UK etc)... some were groups of countries (like EU, Asia, Rest of world, etc).

The store would ask a person to select their country as soon as they attempted to access any area of the store that would display products (ie. if the product database was being access in the background then this would bring up the ZONE selection page). On that page they select their country. In the code this country is linked to a ZONE (one of the 10 I set up). They are now associated with that zone throughout their shopping experience.

The ZONE table would allow me to specify the currency used in each zone (the currency symbol actually).

 

I set up the products table to store zone data... such as which zones the product was available in and what the price was per zone.

This mean that I could have products that were only available in certain countries and I could have very country specific pricing.

This had many advantages.

1) Some products I get drop shipped, but the manufacturer will only drop ship in the USA for instance, so I don't want anyone outside the USA seeing that product

 

2) Some products are simply not allowed to be delivered to certain countries. Maybe they have import restrictions. or maybe it's too heavy to ship internationally etc

 

3) Pricing with exchange rates is actually pretty poor I find. What someone in the USA buys for US$10 someone in NZ will buy it for NZ$10. The dollar often has a 1 to 1 consumer value,,, irrespective of what the exchange rates are. This ZONE system meant I could charge people what I liked in each ZONE.

 

Now here's my question:

I look at PHP coding and it all looks like chinese to me. I can't program in PHP and don't presently have the time to learn a new coding language.

Also, I have very little knowledge of the logic behind the osC software.

 

So I am wondering...

1) Is anyone else interested in a Mod such as what I have described? Would it be of value to anyone else?

 

2) Does anyone have any idea how easy or hard it would be to write the code for this? Is there anyway this can be tied into the existing ZONE system within osC?

 

3) Is there anyone that feels they are able and willing to create something like this?

 

 

I would love to hear back from people on this post... to know what you think about the above points and questions.

 

I feel this feature is very useful, especially for anyone running an international business, selling products in numerous countries etc.

 

With my sincere regards,

 

Jonathan Evatt

 

PS. Let me know if you have any questions or if anything I wrote is not clear. Thanks

[Guest]

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