Would like to start selling wine on my website...

[christayah]

I'm gonna give it a try, thanks Kobra. Hopefully I figure this out before I am a "Zen Follower"

And thanks to kuroi for givin it the old college try.. lets see if this works!

-Chris

[kuroi]

I wouldn't want to pour cold water onto an interesting idea, but you may wish to bear in mind that the group approach would require that you ask customers whether they intend to purchase wine and if so their age and where they intend to ship it, BEFORE they have actually entered your shop and seen your products.

You'd need to ask a variant of these questions every time they roll up at the door, to allow for them buying the good stuff for themselves one visit and the cheap stuff to ship to Auntie Gladys for her 90th (happily the old goat lives several states away) the next time.

And you'd still need to do all the validation at check out anyway in case they change their minds after seeing your wonderful range and decide to ship a bottle to everbody they know.

[christayah]

Yeah i had thought about that..

Alright so how much is it gonna cost me to have it done the right way??



lol

what to do, what to do...

-Chris

[kobra]

My mate kurio, as usual, has indicated some of the possible drawbacks.

1. I envisioned that this would be for groups, and you validate that they are of the correct age group before you link them to the group that can buy after they have registered. Prior to that they can view the items at will. Just can not buy until there is a validation.

2. That through some coding that the wine items are visible for all to see but limited to those that can add to cart & buy. Similar to a showcase function for these items.

3. That if a bonifide buyer is shipping to another location/state, through using multi-zone shipping only states that allow this would be available or processed with success.

4. If they decided to ship a bottle to all their friends these would necessarily have to be individual transactions to accomodate different shipping reciepients. Each trans would be verified through the shipping tables as to if this is allowed.

5. what you can not prevent nor insure against is that a bonafide buyer ships to an under age individual.

6. These are issues that were pointed out earlier that you will want to seek legal advice on as you do not want the BATF knocking at your door.

7. I have just indicated that this is possible and it may not be wise nor legal as this is not my area.

[christayah]

I dont know about everything else you said kobra (i mean literally, i dont know about it, lol) but i do know that it really doesnt matter how old the person says they are who is ordering the wine, it just matters how old the actual recipient is.

The recipient MUST be 21 years old to sign for the alcoholic beverage otherwise the courier would not hand the bottle to them. All that would be explained in the product description and throughout other areas of the site (ie terms and conditions, shipping policies, during checkout, etc).

I dont know really.. this is all really confusing.. i just wish there WERE no laws.. against alchohol anyway

-chris

[meadwench]

I'd be very interested in a solution for this as well.

I did a site in X-cart, and had them write a mod that:

1. Added a field to the products that could be defined as 'wine' or 'not wine'
2. Added an admin shipping mod that allowed the list of allowed shipping states to be created and updated whenever needed.
3. Added a 'Click here to acknowledge that you are 21 or older' box that when clicked revealed the shopping cart submit button
4. Added code to the checkout module that checked the products against the logged in persons (or after they'd entered their shipping info, but before credit cards were taken) shipping address, then if they were *not* in an allowed state, posted a message up 'We're sorry, we cannot ship to your state. Please either ship to an allowed state, or remove the wine from your shopping cart. We apologize for the inconvenience, but federal and state laws require this."

It works a treat. I defined the products, defined the states, and it effectively keeps people from shipping to not-allowed states.

I'd do this in Zen, did I have the skills in programming, but that is why I paid the X-cart folk a couple hundred to do it for me.

Anyone interested in tackling this? I'd pay for it, if the price were reasonable......

[christayah]

meadwench,

So you say you have done that in x-cart. Did x-cart include everything you needed to sell wine on the website? Or did you actually have to program it to do so? and also how is X-cart compared to zencart? if you could give a more detailed experience you have had with this 'mod' for selling wine and using x-cart it would be great to hear your feedback

-chris

[meadwench]

First of all, X-cart is around $200, so that is the first difference. It's an ok package, uses Smarty for the templates, and once I got used to Smarty it was easy to customize. But, the programmers are in Russia, and you have to be very clear on what you want.

Their shipping isn't great, the FedEx isn't live, doesn't take into consideration things like rural shipping charges, signature fees, etc. I spoke with them about it, and they're not interested in implementing a functional FedEx shipping option. The 3rd party mod is $125, works great, but still, extra cash.

All in all, I prefer Zen cart because you don't have to ask Russia for every little thing, its open source (i.e. free) and programmers respond. However, X-cart is working well for the client. You can see their cart at http://www.redstonemeadery.com.

The programming I had X-cart do did include everything I needed to sell wine on the website. However, now that it has custom programming, it can't be upgraded by me without hours and hours of work.

It needs it, there is a critical update. X-cart will do it for the client for $125, which is less money than it would cost them to have me do it, since I'd have to unravel all their programming, upgrade the site, re-apply the programming (while updating any of the custom stuff that won't work with the new code), etc.

I like the way they designed the admin back-end functions. I not only got my extra fields in the product table to define the product as wine or not-wine and the list of 'accepted states' that can be updated, I went ahead and paid them another $75 to give me the extra fields in the database to to allow the customer to sell assortable discounts on mixed purchases, so a customer purchasing 6 bottles of various wines gets a 5% discount, and a case or more gets a 10% discount.

Plus, as a final item (this cost $100), I had them put in a shipping cost area where I could assign additional handling charges for bigger orders, i.e. 3-5 bottles +$2, 6-9 bottles +$3, etc. to account for extra required packaging.

On a point-to-point comparison, X-cart is a lot more logical in the admin section, and much easier to customize. However, it is a lot more expensive too. My client paid close to $600 altogether for their cart and mods. And they'll need to spend another $300 or so to update to the current version and apply the FedEx mod soon.

In another shop I'm using ClickCartPro, and I like that a lot.

What I have found, though, is that there *aren't* any carts out there, paid or open-source, that can handle limited shipping out of the box. The only ones I found that could are thousands up front, and several hundred a month, out of the reach of all but the biggest shops.

So, I'm going to get one developed for Zen Cart, and one for ClickCartPro. Those are my current carts of choice.