Some configuration questions

Greetings, Zen Cart forum people! I am the webmaster for a networking equipment reseller: We buy equipment directly from a variety of vendors, then set it up and support it for our customers. Since we don't get a huge volume of business, the boss likes to handle everything personally; our current web site has no e-commerce functionality whatsoever, no prices displayed, and all sales are accomplished by customers emailing or calling us directly and telling us what they want. I'm already approaching this by using Showcase Mode, but I have a couple questions about how certain things could be done.

=> Is it possible to have what is essentially a showcase site, but have authorized employees be able to log in and go through the entire purchasing process on behalf of the customer? (obviously the whole log-in functionality would need to be hidden from ordinary visitors) This would be a lot easier for the future since we'd be able to ditch the two or three different home-brewed programs we currently use to keep track of payments, shipping, etc. It would also help if logged-in employees could apply arbitrary discounts or additions to the price of an order.

=> Since we don't actually keep any equipment "in stock", only ordering it when the customer does, having a count of how many items are currently stocked is rather pointless. Is it possible to entirely remove this functionality, so that no stock counter is displayed, it's not necessary to input a count when adding an item, and any other function that checks this counter treats it as being infinite?

That's all for now, but I'm sure I'll think of more questions before the week is out. :happy:

...anyone? ...anyone? .........Bueller?

Ooh, and I just thought of something else!

=> I note that you can add many different kinds of options to products, which is nice in situations where Gadget XYZ can be ordered with one out of a selection of different widgets installed. But I would also like to be able to define "specifications", like Physical Dimensions, Operating Voltage, Power Efficiency, etc. that can be arbitrarily applied to groups of products and then have their values set on a per-product basis. Is this possible to accomplish within the option system or by using any additional modules?

Also, if this post is in the wrong forum, please feel free to move it. You have a bewildering variety of forums here, and I didn't think my questions fit neatly into any of the more specific ones, but there may have been something I overlooked.

...anybody? ...anything? ...is this thing on? ...isn't there someone here who knows how to do at least one of these items? I really hate to bump, but these questions may affect whether I even decide to use Zen Cart at all in the future, and I can't put off the decision forever.

Grantovich:

=> Is it possible to have what is essentially a showcase site, but have authorized employees be able to log in and go through the entire purchasing process on behalf of the customer? (obviously the whole log-in functionality would need to be hidden from ordinary visitors) This would be a lot easier for the future since we'd be able to ditch the two or three different home-brewed programs we currently use to keep track of payments, shipping, etc. It would also help if logged-in employees could apply arbitrary discounts or additions to the price of an order.

You might be able to do it with some customizing to the Must be Authorized to buy facilities.

Grantovich:

=> Since we don't actually keep any equipment "in stock", only ordering it when the customer does, having a count of how many items are currently stocked is rather pointless. Is it possible to entirely remove this functionality, so that no stock counter is displayed, it's not necessary to input a count when adding an item, and any other function that checks this counter treats it as being infinite?

That's all for now, but I'm sure I'll think of more questions before the week is out. :happy:

Admin> Configuration> Stock

Grantovich:

=> I note that you can add many different kinds of options to products, which is nice in situations where Gadget XYZ can be ordered with one out of a selection of different widgets installed. But I would also like to be able to define "specifications", like Physical Dimensions, Operating Voltage, Power Efficiency, etc. that can be arbitrarily applied to groups of products and then have their values set on a per-product basis. Is this possible to accomplish within the option system or by using any additional modules?

Configure a set of "read only" Attributes.

Kim:

You might be able to do it with some customizing to the Must be Authorized to buy facilities.

Yes, I have been looking into that. I'll report back if I find anything that works well... it will probably involve commenting out a lot of code that displays things like "log in to buy this product" and etc.

Admin> Configuration> Stock

I already looked there; the first three options were helpful (set to false, false, true), but I still haven't found an option that entirely disables the stock display, or an option that makes it unnecessary to input a stock number when adding products.

Configure a set of "read only" Attributes.

Thanks for that, I didn't quite understand how Attributes worked in the first place. Unfortunately it looks like this method isn't exactly ideal. As an example, let's say I want to add three read-only attributes to display the maximum width, height, and depth of every product we sell. We sell thousands of products. So for each and every one of those, I now have to go into the Option Value Manager, insert three separate numbers to add the values, then go back to the Attribute Controller, find the product, find the correct option value for each attribute (out of the hundreds of unrelated values that are already there for the other products), and apply them to the product. Now that's only for three attributes; in reality, each individual product may have as many as 50 or 60 different attributes, which only apply to the products in that particular category.

It would be much, much easier if it were possible to say: "I am defining an attribute called XYZ that will apply to all products under category ABC", and then simply be able to change those attributes directly on a per-product basis, in much the same way as the "weight" and "model number" fields already work.

Grantovich:

I already looked there; the first three options were helpful (set to false, false, true), but I still haven't found an option that entirely disables the stock display, or an option that makes it unnecessary to input a stock number when adding products.

Ah, just figured out that it's already not necessary to input a stock number; it will be set to zero automatically. But that still leaves the problem of always displaying the stock count on each item page.

Catalog ... Product Type ... Edit Layout ... :smile:

Thanks! That also answered a number of other questions I had relating to the product page.

If anyone has any thoughts on the attributes issue, I'd love to hear them. :wink2: