I want to build a web app for co-ops to get organized on purchasing food together. What I would like to find out here, is whether it would be wise to try to use Zen Cart for that.

Following is a description of what this app does. I would like to find out whether Zen Cart can do this. Indented are my Zen Cart specific questions.

This web app must serve groups of people which organize to purchase food together. From now I will call these groups "co-ops". The co-ops operate in the following way.

Weekly(usually), one person from a co-op informs his co-op of the available products to purchase and their price. I will call this person the "manager". Each member of the coop can then inform the manager what he would like to order and how much. After the orders by the members have been made, the manager then buys the food products from the supplier according to the sum quantities of the orders by the members. When the food has arrived the members come to collect it physically and pay for it (also physically)

Does Zen Cart support "non-payments" or physical payments?

This web app must provide an infrastructure for the following things to happen on-line in it:

* The manager informs the members of the available products and their prices. These can be per unit or per weight (metric system).
* The members place their orders.
* The manager sees all the orders made by the members and also a report summarizing them all.

Is there a summary like this? It has to be per-iteration (usually weekly).


There must be a good permissions system based on user names and passwords. Each user gets only the permissions which are necessary for him to use the app. For example, the managers get full permissions on their coops, the coop members which are not managers get only to view and change their own orders, etc.

There must be an interface for me to add/remove co-ops and their managers, change their passwords and so on. I need also the ability to make anyone a manager for a coop and to make anyone an administrator of the app.

What about this? Multiple shops?

I need to see statistics like how many co-ops are registered, how many orders they make, how many members they have, per month/totals and and all this archived.

I wouldn't imagine to have this kind of functionality in Zen Cart, but perhaps you'd surprise me?

Managers add members to co-ops by entering in a e-mail addresses, names, contact details and notes. Member lists must be printable.

Seems like basic stuff, right? What about the printing?

Managers can choose to assign other users of the coop as managers and they can remove this role from themselves but there must be at least one manager.

Possible in Zen Cart?

All individual orders and manager summaries must be printable.

The summaries are, for example, the total ammont of tomatoes ordered by the members of a co-op in that iteration (usually a week). Is there such a feature?

When the manager publishes the products available and the prices on them, an e-mail message is sent to all members of that coop about this. It doesn't have to contain all the information, but only a link to the page where they can make/change their orders.

I would imagine this to be an existing feature?

Managers must be able to lock the orders so that members would not be able to make changes to their orders any more in that round (usually a week period). Members can still see their orders and managers can still edit member's orders after the lock (this is so that members could contact managers and ask for changes).

This is one of the main issues here. Is Zen Cart able to do these iterations? Some way for the manager to lock down to not allow further orders?

And what about allowing members to fully and freely edit their orders?

Each round of orders is a new one and all the prices and orders from previous rounds is kept in the database, available to the manager for viewing and printing.

Is this kind of archiving available?

When the manager enters the products and their prices, he can easily add products which he has added in previous rounds along with their last prices, which he of course can then change. the manager can also remove items from this.

All printable pages print out in a nice layout on A4 pages.

How are the printing abilities of Zen Cart?

END OF DESCRIPTION

Further, this all needs to look like an app specific for this purpose and not like a normal web shop converted to this purpose. Is this plausible?

I also may be willing to sponsor the development of some of the extensions/add-ons/modules whatever you call them here in Zen Cart which will need to be developed for this.

Looking forward to some insights.