Beginners Question

[stoneroses6300]

Hi. Firstly, I wanted to say thank you in advance for everyone providing help with zencart and this wonderful program in general. I will be starting an ecommerce site this week and the flexibility of zencart is amazing from what I've been reading about it.

Quick couple questions:

1. When an order is processed by a customer, can there be "auto-emails" that go to multiple email addresses. Ideally, the customer obviously would get an email once their order is complete along with the merchant (me) who's selling it. Could I put in a third email address though? For example, could I have the order sent out to a third party manufacturer who would end up sending out the order?

2. What information is the customer getting in an automatic email when they make the order? How much will I be able to "customize" this in the zencart dashboard?

3. Will it be possible to calculate shipment prices in realtime (by UPS for example) by having the customer type in their zipcode, which gets calculated on top of other attributes (weight for example) that I will be able to provide on each product? So the shipping cost would get automated on its own depending on the user typing in their zipcode and the weight of the product. How much flexibility is there in being able to determine shipping costs relative to a products weight, dimensions, etc. in zencart?


Ok. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to get going with zencart.

-Brian

[gjh42]

A third e-mail to the manufacturer/shipper would have to be custom coded - not for the PHP novice.

You should do a test order to see how everything works. If you use the moneyorder payment module for this, it won't cost anything.
The e-mail can be customized in its PHP file; difficulty will depend on what you want to do.

Again, try the USPS or UPS modules and see how they work. They can automate most if not all of this. Dimensional weights may be a problem.

[Celtic]

Personally, I would set up email forwarding in my domain settings that sends a copy of the email to myself and to the supplier.

Then, as far as Zencart is concerned, it's still only sending the email to two places.

Not much good if you have multiple suppliers though, for which you would need quite a bit of customisation.

[stoneroses6300]

Celtic- Good thinking on email forwarding.
But yeah. It doesn't make sense with multiple suppliers.

I would have to script each item (when ordered) to be sent to a third email address (the supplier) besides a copy for myself and the customer. I have yet to start the site so it's something I will end up working on later, but it does seem like it's going to take some time to script. I would be curious if anyone tried having different items sent to different email addresses though.

Thanks for the help so far.

-Brian