Zen-Cart for Distribution Co.?

Hello all. My apologies if this is the wrong section for this post. Please move this post as needed.

My question:

I'd like to implement a "shopping cart" for a small distribution company. It would not need to show pricing or shipping information. Basically, a large product catalog with the ability to order products and generate a confirmation email to our sales dept. and the customer.

Of course, the shopping cart will be accessible only to our retail partners, not to the general public, so it would need to have the actual shopping area inaccessible unless the person uses a valid login (which ideally, we would assign).

Is Zen-Cart a good solution for what I described? Is it overkill? Or is it missing features I would need (I highly doubt this)?

Any information/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Best,
Rafael

Not too sure about having login's assigned by your company but you could make new accounts require approval by you.

You could also set the cart to "Must login to browse" so there might be no need to hide the site from the general public.

As for not showing prices, just set all products to free and change the image for free products to whatever you want.

Sounds like a perfect solution to me.

There is a setting that allows browsing of the catalog but prices do not display unless they are registered and logged in. This is what I use for our wholesale distributing company. See yourself at https://www.artwax.com/wholesale

It works great for us.

You may set the shop so you need to approve new registered accounts. No problem Zen is the way to go.
:smile:

spbennett:

Not too sure about having login's assigned by your company but you could make new accounts require approval by you.

You could also set the cart to "Must login to browse" so there might be no need to hide the site from the general public.

As for not showing prices, just set all products to free and change the image for free products to whatever you want.

Sounds like a perfect solution to me.

I think you're absolutely right. This sounds perfect... And it wouldn't take too much to implement at all, from what I've seen. I think it's actually better for me if the customer signs up and we approve/deny, since I can always inquire with my sales staff whether someone should have access to our order system or not.

Thanks a bunch!

mydanilo:

There is a setting that allows browsing of the catalog but prices do not display unless they are registered and logged in. This is what I use for our wholesale distributing company. See yourself at https://www.artwax.com/wholesale

It works great for us.

You may set the shop so you need to approve new registered accounts. No problem Zen is the way to go.
:smile:

Nice! The only problem with your suggestion is that our customers all have credit terms, and get a price book before becoming customers (we distribute to supermarkets and smaller gourmet markets), and they get price changes immediately via fax, so they really don't have too much need to see the prices online. Though, group pricing might work depending on how deeply I can customize each pricing tier. Otherwise, your site looks pretty dead on as far as what I'm trying to accomplish.

Thank you both! You've made my decision pretty painless. Kudos.

Rafael

I have added a check out possibility for customers with terms, no need for credit cards. I think I just modified the fax payment module. Let me know if you need to know more. Not sure if you can set discount levels by customers.

Good luck.

hey, i realise that this is a really old post, but i had a similar question... my company has over 5000 employees, and doing the account verification on each of these employees is going to be a huge pain.
I was just wondering if there is any way i can have the login page connect to a different host/database and confirm the username and password there and then continue on shopping?

the basic idea here is that... no one other than people in our company will buy stuff from the site... each employee has their own login and password assigned to them by us. all i want to be able to do is:

when they go to the store and click on login:

1. confirm their username and password -> IN A DIFFERENT DATABASE
2. when username and password are confirmed store needs to check and see if the store has their shipping, name, phone number etc...

thank you soo much for your help

hope to hear from you guys soon...

--T

PHP Version: 5.1.6
HTTP Server: Apache/2.2.3
and i have the latest version of zencart... v1.3.8