Hello everyone, I have been designated to head up research for my employer to come up with a way to offer franchise "mirror sites" for the 4 dozen e-commerce websites in our network. The point of this whole project is to offer in-house incentive & extra curricular earning opportunities for our employees. The theory is to franchise our e-commerce websites and offer our employees their very own completely customizable franchise, ecommerce website. Employees could then run this websites as their own business to earn a designated percentage of revenues.
Several problems arise with the different format of e-commerce websites we run. Some are full fledged 2,000 product stores with custom shopping carts, others run boxed software such as oscommerce or X cart, many are one or two product websites with single page checkouts, and finally others operate on simple PayPal carts. Being that there is such a wide variety of e-commerce sites and backend cart software, we have yet to come up with a solution to replicate these sites.
The goal is to completely offer our employees their own business. So let's say employee "A" chooses our software website with a db of 1,500 products. "A" would then instantly have a complete "mirror" of our website and to any customer it would appear to be a completely different business than our original website. There is a need to differentiate the appearance, including: a completely new design, different colors, different logos, different prices, new contact info, etc. Ideally it could easily be customized on two levels. One we could provide pre-customized templates, color schemes, or graphics for our employees. Second, our employees could edit their own graphics and appearance through a simple web based interface. We would still like to run and manage all orders through our original website to eliminate the need for our employees to purchase web certificates, merchant accounts, etc. Thus the product and order fulfillment would be handled on a drop ship basis. All employees could then track their sales through an admin panel and we would submit their earnings with their employee pay checks.
All the franchise management, employee admin panel, employee management panel, should not be a problem to code. The real concern is how we can offer replicated versions of our original sites and allow our customers to fully customize them, while still maintaining a functional shopping cart. Perhaps all replicated mirror sites would be run off sub domains such as http://username.corporation.com/ and then through forwarding employees could use their own dot com and it would still appear to run completely off their domain. But again, that doesn't address the appearance of the replicated site and the ability to customize it.
Does anyone have any ideas of how we could accomplish this, especially considering it should be able to provide instant franchise mirror sites for numerous different "types" of websites, that are run by completely different shopping carts?
So far the best idea we have come up with is a template system, where through the use of templates, customers could easily change the look and feel of their website. But again, how could this be global to work with dozens of different formats of websites?
As for the payment pages, we have considered each franchise to forward to our server in a neutral looking page with the franchises logo and name.
I apologize for this extremely long post, I hope some of you experienced and creative developers can provide interesting input to this quandary. Like I mentioned, we have not even broke ground on the path for this solution, so if anyone has a completely different approach on how this could be accomplished, by all means, let's hear it.
I've looked for existing solutions, but have yet to find any, since there appears to be little to no market for such a service.
I do appreciate any and all advice and look forward to some great ideas from all the PHPBuilder members.
Thanks again!
Regards,
Tom