Advice on Functionality

[JohnDawlings]

I work for a medical research charity. In addition to our research we also sell biological cell lines in Australia and overseas. We are looking for an open source e-commerce platform to improve the visibility of the products we sell. Being a niche market with a rather unusual product line, we need a few bits of functionality that are unusual (as well as many that would be met by pretty much any e-commerce platform). Specifically we are looking for a platform that will enable us to:

1. Have a large number of user defined characteristics for a product. These characteristics/attributes would be of a descriptive nature (eg this cell line...) rather than a sub-category (eg small, medium or large if talking about shirts). These attributes would need to be searchable.

2. These fields, being descriptive, may well be very large containing hundreds (if not thousands) of characters.

3. As our sales volume is very low and very much tailored to the individual, we do not want to display prices nor do we want to allow people to buy on-line. We simply want people to be able to see our products and then phone us to discuss an order. So we would want to be able to ‘turn off’ any shopping cart and credit card functionality.

I would be grateful for feedback from other Zen Cart users on whether Zen Cart would support these rather unusual bits of functionality.

My thanks in advance.

[DrByte]

If you're not selling and not displaying prices, then you aren't really needing an "ecommerce" package specifically.
But, Zen Cart CAN operate in a "showcase without prices" mode, which essentially ignores all the power of the ecommerce functionality.

Boiling your points down to their simplest form, it seems you're looking for "a catalog which allows you to manage a catalog of 'documents' with many customizable fields." In fairness, those 'documents' do have some degree of parallelism to a 'product' in an ecommerce environment, perhaps moreso than they would for a traditional "CMS" system might.

Adding the "large number of custom-text fields that are also searchable" capability to Zen Cart would require some custom coding to suit those unique requirements. It's certainly do-able though.

[JohnDawlings]

Thanks for your response, DrByte. You have summarised our needs well. We regard this as an e-commerce issue because when you consider the entire process (computer system for looking at the catalogue with follow up manual sales procedure), it is indeed an e-commerce issue. The difference is that only the first half is truly e-commerce, the second half is old fashioned manual commerce!

[DrByte]

True that.

And the "showcase mode" of Zen Cart specifically directs customers to "Contact Us" if they wish to dialog further about any particular item.
You might consider entertaining the "ask a question about this product" plugin, as it allows product-specific details to be pre-filled on the contact-us form. Similarly, the "request a quote" plugin might provide similar benefits to suit your needs. While I've not used either of those plugins myself, I've seen evidence of their use by various people talking about them here on the support forum. Food for thought.

[JohnDawlings]

I realise I have slightly mis-represented our requirements and as I cannot see how to edit my original post, I will re-post. The change is that shopping cart functionality is needed.

I work for a medical research charity. In addition to our research we also sell biological cell lines in Australia and overseas. We are looking for an open source e-commerce platform to improve the visibility of the products we sell. Being a niche market with a rather unusual product line, we need a few bits of functionality that are unusual (as well as many that would be met by pretty much any e-commerce platform). Specifically we are looking for a platform that will enable us to:

1. Have a large number of user defined characteristics for a product. These characteristics/attributes would be of a descriptive nature (eg this cell line...) rather than a sub-category (eg small, medium or large if talking about shirts). These attributes would need to be searchable.

2. These fields, being descriptive, may well be very large containing hundreds (if not thousands) of characters.

3. As our sales volume is very low and very much tailored to the individual, we do not want to display prices nor do we want to allow people to buy on-line. We simply want people to be able to see our products, use the shopping cart functionality to identify products they want and then generate an e-mail to us asking for a quote.. So we would want to be able to ‘turn off’ any credit card functionality.

I would be grateful for feedback from other Zen Cart users on whether Zen Cart would support these rather unusual bits of functionality.

My thanks in advance.

[DrByte]

3. Your new requirements for this point can also be handled with a few variations to the code.
Possible approaches you could consider include:
- use the built-in product is "call for price" setting where no price is displayed, but instead the customer is directed to contact you about it. You can augment that functionality by adding addons like "ask a product question"
- use an addon which allows customers to add products to their cart and then "request a quote"
- use an addon like "minimum advertised price" if you do wish to display prices only after someone adds something to their cart
- use the built-in Customer Authorization features to require a customer's account to be authorized before they can see prices. Everyone else will be asked to login before being able to see prices. Once logged in to an authorized account, they can shop using whatever checkout methods you offer, either credit cards, purchase orders, or "request a quote" as mentioned earlier

[JohnDawlings]

Thank you again, DrByte.