Survery: Ecommerce Suite

theslinky

Hi all,

After working on customized ecommerce solutions for many clients, I've decided to write a fully features ecommerce suite. Before you go off and say: why don't you use this... or that, let me assure you that I have looked at and used a lot of free and commercial stuff on the web. Some are good, many are bad, but none really contain "all" the features. That's probably not possible, but the free ones don't have very many features.

So my question is: if you were programming a (or looking for a) ecommerce solution, what features would you like to see?

I already know about the basic and intermediate features... I'm looking for advanced/extraneous features (examples: maintaining multiple warehouses, creating "ecommerce chains", advanced customer management stuff, order processing with multiple suppliers and figuring out cost effective ways to split orders for different suppliers, maintaning stock status for differen branches, warehouses, product variations, etc., and tons more).

So please let me know any feature you'd look for (code) in a ecommerce system, and any extraneous or specialized feature.

I'm going to make the entire project opensource and try to make it useful and easy to use (i hope!).

-sridhar

Anon

One thing that I have yet to find in a good eCommerce package (which is hard enough to find anyway) is a standard, integrated, content management system for managing "the rest" of the website.

From the commercial side of it, most companies that use eCommerce software also have a normal corporate presence site and sometimes a customer support site. These require often painful measures by the company webmaster or web team to integrate the rest of the site content into a design that (closely at least) matches their packaged eCommerce site.

And just in case, you have seen http://oscommerce.org/ in your review of OSS eCommerce packages? It is light years ahead of the rest and does 90% of what a package my company paid $10k for in a packaged solution (the missing 10% is mostly back end integration with a quoting package by the same company, with FoxPro flat files! ICK!!).

theslinky

Jerry, I so totally am going to put in a CMS! That's one of the reasons I'm writing my own program (sorry I didn't mention it!).

The way it will work is using templates, but it will not be just a cheesy template parsing thing that adds in headers and footers... no sir! You'll be able to create parse definitions to insert ANY kind of data (from database, another HTML file, XML, import data from common formats like word excel powerpoint, etc., and tons more features.

I'm also making a distinction on how to combine two types of product managements:

some companies are simply resellers who send in a blind-order invoice to a suppliers whereas others keep a local inventory and ship it out. And then there are companies who completely manufacture and sell their own items.

-sridhar

theslinky

sorry, i'm just ... careless? :-)

-sridhar