Will it work for me?

[anke]

Hi all,

I am interning with a nonprofit that wants to set up an online store, and I was asked to investigate shopping cart options. We want to use Dwolla for customers to pay, and we found Zen Cart on their site:https://developers.dwolla.com/dev/carts.

We are looking for a hosted cart solution.

Our website, http://ClassWish.org, already lets people make charitable donations to fund classroom supplies for any school or teacher in the country. See:
http://classwish.org/schools/128413-...mentary-School (one of 125,000 school pages)
http://classwish.org/teachers/15696-Michael-Angel (one of many teacher pages)
We manage that process with customizable PayPal standard buttons. It works fine for our purposes.

We want to let visitors shop for gift cards, too. We will have about 1,000 cards (about 250 retailers, each with about 4 price points). Visitors pay the face amount of the gift card, and we donate the 5% or so margin we earn to the wish list of the school or teacher they want to support. That thin margin is the reason we want to use Dwolla.

In order to identify make it easy for visitors, we will have the gift card shopping experience on a page for every school and on a page for every teacher. That way, they do not have to specify the school or teacher from among so many options (and with so many having the same name). Instead, they would just go to the gift card shopping page for their preferred school or teacher, and we would just grab the school or teacher ID from the page, and we would pass it through to the cart. (BTW, our site is built in Ruby on Rails).

Again, PayPal is not a good solution for the gift cards, since our margin is so thin. We therefore want to use Dwolla.

We looked at stores, such as Shopify, Magento, and Big Commerce, but none of them is really well-suited to having the shopping experience on our site, which is where we want to keep the visitors. (That is because we want them to see the donation opportunities, too, and so we can automatically grab the ID from the school or teacher page they are on).

We envision something somewhat akin to our use of customizable PayPal standard buttons for donations, but leading to a cart that uses Dwolla checkout (confirmed users only, not guests). That is:
· We would have a gift card shopping page for each school and teacher page

· We would have the same thousand gift card items on each of those school or teacher pages

· The person would click the ‘add to cart’ button for whatever gift card (a particular retailer and price point, such as the Exxon $100 gift card)

· The code for that button would already specify the specific card (retailer and price point). We would customize the button to pass through to the cart the ID for the school or teacher whose page the visitor is shopping from.


An alternative approach would also let the customer check a box for each of the cards they want and then click a single button to go to the cart.

I am just wondering whether Zen Cart allows this process.

Thanks,

[Absolute]

The short answer is "No it doesn't...... straight out of the box" BUT it could do......

You need to look at Zen Cart as a great vehicle for your business. It's flexible, can be a small van, a chauffeur driven car, a bus, or a 40T truck - you just need to decide what it is you want/need.

We've built solutions for clients from "Mom & Pop" stores, selling 5 items, through to ticket selling sites, through sites with over 100,000 products, turning over in excess of $10 million a year.

They all have one thing in common, and that is, despite the way the end product appeared to the user, they all used Zen as the back end.

So, in a glass half full type way, YES, Zen will do what you want. The only thing you need to consider is that it will need a little customisation in order to set it up to suit your exact circumstances.

A simple solution could be for you to look at setting up Gift Cards as Products. You can then set up the values as Attributes. So you have one card for ACME Dept Store, and add 5 attributes for $5, $10, $25, $50 and $100.

Then install something along the lines of the Recommended By or an Affiliate program from the "FREE" add-ons section on this site. You can then track where your sales came from, and in turn where your 5% should go for the sales.

Possibilities are endless - it's just your imagination and investment (time or budget) that limits your venture.

Absolute

[afo]

Zen Cart isn't a "back end", but I don't see why it couldn't do what you ask if you're willing to put some time in to make it work. Schools and teachers could be products within Zen Cart.

I suggest you download Zen Cart, set up a test site and play with it. That's the only way you'll really be able to tell if it'll work for you. When you get stuck or have questions, the FAQ, Wiki and forum are always here to help.

[Absolute]

I would shy away from making schools & teachers into products. You stated that you wanted the same 1,000 gift cards sold throughout, and then linked to a school or teacher. If you had 50 schools signed up, then you would be looking to manage somewhere near 50,000 attributes, and this would just kill your store.

And Zen as a backend? It's great as both front and backend. It's just if you are going to use it as both, then perhaps you might need to invest a lot of time and effort in making it suit your audience...... Customers these days expect something a little more HTML5, jQuery and even CSS3 orientated...... In my experience, it builds consumer confidence if they are impressed with the style, simplicity and functionality of a site they are putting their Credit Card details into.

Just my 2c worth.

Absolute

[mc12345678]

I had started a response to this the day it was posted; however, have notbeen able to totally finish it because of looking up a link to another suggested download. Based on the design discussion I was also going to suggest attributes on the teachers/schools. It seems that in either regard to tie the gift/donation to the individual/organization the quantity is a large matrix. So either the 50,000 attributes, or the same or more for the teacher/organization to be tied to the donation. One seems that it would be more stable than the other.

Regardless I was going to suggest also using an additional tool such as easy populate or apsona to be able to manipulate the data associated. Therefore if a particular attribute changed then it could be changed/updated en mass instead of onsy twosy. Also, to possibly use attribute grid layout so that. Could choose the multi denominational portion of the gift card(s) $5 gift card to business x and a $10 gift card to business y or whatever mix.

Of course could also use these cards as products where they are a product off of a sub-category like the teacher or the school, but still talking about having to link this massive product list to each new sub-category. There are a multitude of ways to make the list work, each has it's strengths and weaknesses. Some are easier to implement with existing code modifications, while others would require a bit more custom coding. Going down that path would require some evaluation as to resources (money, time, people) and need/desire of those that want the store to look/respond in a way that they have determined best.

If I can get some more time I'll see if I can post my original response, but hopefully in the meantime the OP has begun trying to use ZC and get a little understanding of it's out of box capabilities.