Zen Cart Functionality - quote->bid->price->pay->complete ?

My goodness, first, an apology, if this has been covered elsewhere, but I searched and searched and just couldn't find it. So here goes.

I'm trying to help a friend set up an online site for his real estate appraisal business.

This is what I need the shopping cart program to do. Can any of you tell me if Zen Cart has this functionality?

A customer should be able to login, and place an order for an appraisal. There is no charge for placing the order, as each appraisal's cost is calculated after the work is done.

Once the appraisal request is recieved, the company should be able to update the order information to note that the appraisal request has been recieved, and update the order information with the scheduled date and time for the appraisal, and the anticipated date of completetion of the report.

Once the appraisal is completed, the company needs to be able to once again update the order, this time to include the price of the appraisal and the amount now due, and once the order has been paid for, another notice sent to the customer to notify them that the order has been completed.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Tracy

To do this, I'd make the product Free & use the Free Shipping option in ZC for the online order.

Then I would download the order to QuickBooks or something where the invoice info can be done "manually" to order. Then I'd send a PDF of the invoice via email to the customer or via the US Mail.

ZC is an ecommerce package and while one could initially purchase an appraisal through the ZC software, these other options seem to me to be outside a traditional ecommerce operation. Hence, my suggestion to download the customer details and put the rest of the project through something like Quick books with the options of doing purchase orders and invoicing.

You could do custom programming to maybe adapt ZC to do this stuff; I'm not a developer so I do not know what that would take. Someone else here may be able to give you another suggestion.

Good luck,