future ideas for oscmax?

[blackhawk]

Hi everyone,
I am very new to oscmax and was curious about several features I'm looking for. If you are a developer or administrator please respond because i'm looking for e commerce integration solutions i can invest in within the next 6 to 12 months and want to know if oscmax is a good choice for me to make. Your feedaback is much appriciated! I'm looking for the follow abilities....

1. Able to run 2 stores with different visual presentations - allowing to to select which products I can run on both sites. all integrated into one database. It benefits the customer so they don't have to log in twice for 2 separate sites.

2. Allows editing current orders and creating new customer accounts with orders from the admin panel.

3. Allows multiple tracking numbers to be stored for UPS,FEDEX AND USPS with multiple shipping methods.

4. Allows individual purchased product status (i.e. showing in the customers account history - "hi jane, this x product is currently on back order. it'll be shipped in a week.") of not just a main products in the cart, but on "cross sell" products purchased too.

5. Able to show this back order status on invoice updates.

6. Able to create product orders for vendors.

7. Allows certain products to be free shipping if the "total dollar amount on the order" is met at a certain figure, while the freight items within that same order still get shipping charges.

8.Allows customers to receive live UPS rates on products coming from various warehouse zone location(s) - not from my main headquarters.

9. Live shipping rates to puerto rico, alaska and hawaii

10. SEO urls and SEO header tags titles and meta data for each page.

11.Able to create custom pages on the fly. Each page modified with a tinymce editor and able to modify its plug-ins.

12. Instructions on how to import and export product data in .cvs format directly from phpmyadmin.

13. For orders that are "check by mail" or "cash on delivery", the product stock doesn’t change until the check has been cleared.

Thank you so much for your feedback!

[jpf]

Moved to proper forum......

[jpf]

1. Able to run 2 stores with different visual presentations - allowing to to select which products I can run on both sites. all integrated into one database. It benefits the customer so they don't have to log in twice for 2 separate sites.

Yep can do.

2. Allows editing current orders and creating new customer accounts with orders from the admin panel.

Yep

3. Allows multiple tracking numbers to be stored for UPS,FEDEX AND USPS with multiple shipping methods.

Can be added

4. Allows individual purchased product status (i.e. showing in the customers account history - "hi jane, this x product is currently on back order. it'll be shipped in a week.") of not just a main products in the cart, but on "cross sell" products purchased too.

Already notes when items are on back order. Cross sell already included.

5. Able to show this back order status on invoice updates.

Yep

6. Able to create product orders for vendors.

Backorder report.

7. Allows certain products to be free shipping if the "total dollar amount on the order" is met at a certain figure, while the freight items within that same order still get shipping charges.

Yep

8.Allows customers to receive live UPS rates on products coming from various warehouse zone location(s) - not from my main headquarters.

Multivendor shipping - can be added.

9. Live shipping rates to puerto rico, alaska and hawaii

Yep

10. SEO urls and SEO header tags titles and meta data for each page.

Included

11.Able to create custom pages on the fly. Each page modified with a tinymce editor and able to modify its plug-ins.

Use Article Manager and add it to your site - yep. We use FCKEditor - but can sub tineymce if you want.

12. Instructions on how to import and export product data in .cvs format directly from phpmyadmin.

CVS product import/export is available directly from the admin page

13. For orders that are "check by mail" or "cash on delivery", the product stock doesn’t change until the check has been cleared.

Not sure that a week wait is needed.... but can be changed.

[blackhawk]

thank you jpf! the only reason i was inquiring on importing exporting from phpadmin is because i have 2000 products and easy populate recommends no more than 300 products be uploaded or downloaded at a time. they say that above that number you have to start splitting things???? sounds kinda wierd and just want to update everything at one time - whats your thoughts?

thanks again!
-blackhawk

[jpf]

If your looking at a more dynamic way to update items - do a direct via OBDC a SQL query and skip the whole php thing.

You can do it many different ways to up-date your items - but the possablity of mucking something up grows quite large...

Perfered ways to update items: (from easy/little harm to hardest/easy to muck up things)
1-Manual updates in the admin. Great for small and immediate changes. (no need to take down store. Everything is checked for valid data)
2-Thru-EZPopulate. Better for bulk changes on basic items. (Qty may have been changed/bought. Verification and data conversion is hidden from user)
3-Thru-PHPMyAdmin Manually. More accurate control - but manual. (No need to take down store - You have to know exactly what your doing. Error prone)
4-Direct CSV IMPORT/EXPORT with ALL feilds. May be faster than EZPop as not converting a simple file into SQL....(May have to down store - No error checking verification or anything like that.)
5-OBDC direct to MySQL using SQL statement. Use Excel/Access or other OBDC to update files. If you need more real time changes. (no need to take down store - but could have serous effect on items. Very little error checking - just vaildate that data is correct variable types)

Nothing is impossible. Just what you need to do on a daily bases may depend on the solution.

If it is more of a one time load - with an occasional update (once/twice a week) with just changed data - then EZPop is my choice.

If you have a HUGE import to do then maybe doing a FULL CSV import might be worth it. But for 2000 items for one time..nope. However if over 35,000 then yes I would.


2000 / 300 = just under 7...... 7 files to import is no that bad

It all about time - time to import a few fields via EZPop than to figure out and re-create the proper structure for up to 10 different tables (or more) with FULL and proper data anywhere from 3 data fields to 18 data fields and properly formatted into a CSV or as an SQL import....

[blackhawk]

Thank you jpf
and you are right. It's really nothing to cry over compared to 35,000 uploads. EZPopulate sounds the best choice for me.

Thanks
bh

[blackhawk]

hi jpf,
how can we create product orders for vendors with oscmax?

thanks

[jpf]

No PO generation system (as no contact info for manufacture and not necessarily is manufacture the supplier) but can create/modify reports:
SalesTracker v1.0
Shows all sales today or sales between a certain date range.

or maybe:
Sales Report
A sales report utility that includes Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly sales reports, including Total # of Orders, Avg. Order Amount, Total Sales, % Variance from previous hours/days/weeks/months.


To have a full blown PO ordering system would take quite a bit of work. A person I know did just that for a commercial ordering system (ie: non-GPLable) - it is a long and complicated process.

To get a list of items that are on BACKORDER by manufacture would not be hard to create using the above for a start. You could create a SQL query and put that into Excel or Access to generate a more official document and to a lookup by item to generate a supplier and MIN/MAX table.....etc....

[blackhawk]

thanks for the start. I know exactly what I want. All I want to do is copy invoice.php that is installed in oscmax 2.0.3 and call the new page stock_product_order.php.

(A)
when you land on the page you will also see a drop down list of manufactures you can choose. So i can imagine that includes an html pull down menu of all my manfactures. when I click on any of them, it generates "THAT" manufacture with their address on that page.

(B)
instead of seeing price per product, it instead shows me cost per product and total cost.

Both should be easy to apply without deep coding?

thanks
bh

[blackhawk]

I got a simple purchase order page going on with the use of this module - osCommerce Community Add-Ons, combined with a cost field in the product table and finally a comments field displayed, you can have a nice little purchase order for suppliers without busting out a crazy system, especially if the the only thing that is important is showing the product (which was added with the order editor), its manufacturer, its cost and and additional comments. perfect!