Using Zen Cart to capture/export orders (but not charge)

Hi all,

Wondering if Zen Cart is a good solution (with some customization) for this scenario. Really just need a way to capture orders online and export data to our POS/management system.

• There would be no prices online - just capture the products ordered and customer info
• allow customers to see their order history (easy)
• import previous order history from the current offline process
• as orders are placed have an XML file exported to go to the POS system. Alternatively, a daily batch might work. But I do need to get the order data out in a specific XML format to go into the POS system that actually processes the orders.

Debating whether it's easy to build something from scratch or modify something like Zen Cart. I searched and didn't find much info on exporting XML from Zen Cart, so maybe that's a deal breaker there.

If you have no prices online are you going to let customers order online?

They can "order" but nothing will be charged online (no payment processing). Orders will be processed offline (hopefully via an export of the data or some other method to get the XML that's needed.) Kind of a quoting system.

Basically add items to a cart, put in user info, and checkout but there's no shipping or charges for the items in the order.

Matt is a guy who has posted on the blog for Tina POS has integrated zencart with that program. He has mentioned to me in the last couple days that he should be posting the patch that links the two.

If you are using that program, you might want to ask him what his "patch" does.

This is just an idea and might not work with your system depending on what POS you are using.

Good Luck.