Is Reseller Templating Possible?

[Ulysses]

Hi,

I am looking for a shopping cart that supports reseller templating, similar to the http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell business model, where users can sign up to sell products from the shop, via their own sites using templates.

Does this cart have this facility? If not, can it be modified to achieve this?

Thanks

[Ulysses]

Any thoughts on this? Can ZenCart be modded to achieve this? Anyone?

[kuroi]

Sounds like what you're after is something like www.officetrader.net.

Zen Cart is open source and can be modded to do virtually anything you like. But it's not set up to do this sort of thing out of the box and the site referred to above has required very extensive additions taking several months of work.

[Ulysses]

Hi kuroi,

Thanks for your reply. I had a look at http://www.officetrader.net but I could not find their reseller service. Maybe it's a different business model.

I want people to sell my stuff, from my template at their site that looks like their site, using my cart and checkout that looks like their site.

The classic example is CafePress, who sell T-shirts etc.

Can we mod Zen-Cart to do this? What do you think?

[kuroi]

Sorry. Didn't fully understand the business model you were proposing there. Office Trader allows other people to sell their products on your site (often requested here), whereas you wish to allow other people to sell your products.

It doesn't look to me though as though CafePress users are really selling from their own sites, but rather that CafePress creates a subdomain of its own site for them (and describes that as their own site!). This is certainly doable. Zen Cart gives you a good and adaptable starting point, but there would be a high degree of customization (mostly new code) required and you would need a high degree of technical skill or a fairly large budget to achieve it.

Some of the new functions that you would need to develop would be:

• a second level of customer who buys the service rather than the product
• ability to filter product display according to incoming URL
• a selection of templates whose display is determined by incoming URL
• new reports to segregate sales by "shop"
• functionality for customizing products
• a store owners' section that allows them to "create" products and tailor them
• store owners' control panel
• improved search facilities geared to this particular application
• automated subdomain creation

and I'm sure that's not a comprehensive list .......................

[Ulysses]

kuroi,

That's music to my ears, and very good news.

I will keep you posted of how it goes. Or more to the point, probably come cap in hand seeking help on questions that come up during the build.

Cheers

[kuroi]

I'll be interested to see how it goes.

Some advice ...

Zen Cart will give you an architecture for building pages, listing products and completing purchases. But there's still a lot to do. As you will want to be able to upgrade as easily as possible to take advantage of the speed improvements in the pipeline, develop your new functions as new modules and pages and keep them as separate as possible from Zen Cart core code (although you won't be able to avoid going in their, but do it as surgically as possible).

Get to know the functions already available in Zen Cart, especially those for database access and those in the html_output file. They can save you a huge amount of time.

Don't expect it to happen overnight. There are months of work ahead of you. This is a big development.

Good luck.

[Ulysses]

All good advice. Thanks.