New user with a lot of questions and mod requirements.

[RQuadling]

Hello.

I'm evaluating Zen Cart to see if can fit our requirements. From what I've seen, Zen Cart can be tuned to do a lot of these things, but I'd like some help/suggestions on the various mods that I could use or need to manually implement.

1 - We don't require new customers to enter their details via Zen Cart. So can I disable/remove the "New Customer" page and instead supply a phone number/email address to talk to our sales department.

2 - We would like to create a one-use password for the new customers so that when we import a new customer and their delivery addresses, we can send them an email saying what their current password is and that they need to reset it. If sending the password is a bad move (it probably is), then at least some mechanism by which they have to supply the password they want to use. Essentially forcing a reset password option but without them entering a current password.

3 - We would like customer specific pricing. Not discounts, just a price per product per customer. Our internal systems has all the data for this, so we don't need any sort of user interface in the admin section, just the ability for the code to use the new pricing structure. From what I can tell, it looks like the code dealing with 'final_price' is all I need to amend (new table for cust_prod_price, a few inner joins, etc.) - but if there's a mod ...

4 - The customer must be able to enter an order number - this is the link between their business and ours when it comes to payment. The order ID generated by Zen Cart is of no use to us as it isn't connected to the customer's own systems in any way.

5 - Once the customer has entered the products and quantities that they want, we want to create a PDF file with the items that they've ordered clearly detailed and have the PDF emailed to them and to us. We have systems in place that allow for PDF files to be displayed and appropriate data keyed from it into our accounts/ordering systems. Being able to add orders to this process would be very beneficial to us. Once the PDF is transmitted, the order is complete. There is no "processing" or "delivery" stages.

6 - The ability to import new (or amended) customer data, as well as products, images and addresses is also a fundamental requirement. The data is held in our own systems. In contacting the hoster's tech support, we are not allowed remote access to the mysql databases due to "security concerns". That's fair enough, so we would have to create a data importer script to accept the current data and to import new entries and report on different entries. In the main, the data won't be amended in Zen Cart, just used and updated by the importer. But if the data is amended (say a customer corrects or adds a new delivery address), then we would like to know this. Ideally, a datetime of last change on customer/products/addresses/etc. would be what I would like.


Fundamentally, the system we want is for simple order capture with customer specific pricing. No payments, invoicing or shipping/despatching/delivery processing.

When an order is entered, for a PDF file to be produced and emailed to the customer and to us for entering into the appropriate document processing queue on our network.

A lot of things different to the conventional shopping cart. In truth it is just order capture. Orders are invoiced monthly from our systems. No online payment.

Regards,

Richard Quadling.

[kuroi]

This would require an awful lot of customisation. But that would be the case whatever cart you wanted to use, as you'd be substituting interfaces to your own systems and data for functionality that all carts provide as core features.

1) Yes, you could, but it would prevent customers from purchasing until you have created an account that they can access in some other way. But your later points suggest that you are planning this.

2) There isn't an import customer facility in Zen Cart, but provided you developer achieves a good understanding of how the customer data hangs together, this wouldn't be difficult to do. Zen Cart has password generation code that you could use (indeed would have to for it to recognize and accept your results), but the one-use feature would require adding an extra column to the customer table to flag the password's status.

3) Zen Cart offers an awful lot of pricing options, plus currency handling that can make this area quite complex. But if you're not planning to use them then, in principle you're on the right lines by thinking to replace the final price processing with an API call to your existing systems.

4) This wouldn't work as stated, but I think you're confusing two things: Zen Cart's order number, which is an internal index and so extremely risky to play with, and must be unique, which you couldn't guarantee if they're chosen by customers and purchase order numbers, which are free text fields chosen by customers. I believe that there is a payment mod that supports this, though it may do more than you want by allowing payment to be deferred until the customer is invoiced.

5) This one's a bit sparse on information, but it sounds as though you want to pass order information via an API to your PDF generation and treat passing that information as order complete. With a little customer coding, this can be done.

6) This is a bit unclear. Are you saying that you webhost doesn't allow you remote access to your own databases. If so, I suspect that you need a more sophisticated webhost - one who knows how to support this basic requirement for any organisation using proper tools for database administration (i.e. not phpMyAdmin). In any case, it sounds like you're describing a custom data importer. And please note that in Zen Cart images are held in the file system, not the database.

So all doable, but no cart will be able to offer anything remotely like this straight out-of-the-box.

[kuroi]

Reading back over this, I'm wondering why you would use a cart at all.

You're negating much of what makes a cart a cart. You may find it easier to start with a normal CMS to handle the customer / user data and have product selection trigger your API calls.