We’re kicking around the idea of giving FoxyCart’s FoxEE a go…

Anyone have an experience and/or thoughts?

Is it stable?

More importantly, does it work? (Hey, ya never know.)

And how easy is it to implement / integrate with EE?

Any input would be considered valuable. Thanks in advance.

It does work, and for us it’s worked very well. I’d recommend it to anyone that needs something more than Simple Commerce can do.

I used it on a very large EE e-commerce project, and I have two more smaller ones that we’ll be using it on as well. The existing project has a library of 25K articles/photos for viewing online as EE entries, then available for purchase/download along with an overly complex (!) tiered membership/billing system.

There’s a new release pending that might have made the initial setup process easier (we had to have some custom scripting done since we had so many archive entries that had to be added as downloadables for FoxEE that probably would have been easier with the import feature they’re implementing), but it works very well. We’ve been up and running with essentially a beta version since January, and aside from the occasional wrinkle, it’s worked pretty seamlessly once everybody got used to the process. We had one issue related to an incremental update that rankled downloads for a couple of days, but the client was able to still record the purchases and deliver the files manually until a fix was in place.

As for ease-of-use, I guess it depends on what you’re using it for, and how comfortable you are sorting through the various entities (FoxEE, EE, FoxyCart, and whatever gateway you use) to get things working the way you want. Ours wasn’t particularly easy, but that had less to do with FoxEE than the particular complexities of the client’s setup.

The guys at HCC have been very responsive whenever I’ve had a question or issue, and seem to be very committed to packing it as full of features as we might need down the road.

very cool. thx.

any chance of posting the link to the site you mentioned?

questions:

- does it just make a weblog into a catalog? in other words, can we make custom fields for the products and SKUs?

- can the product / sku weblog (or whatever) be managed like any other EE weblog in that it’s easy to do crossing selling on other site pages, etc?

Basically, you make a weblog(s) for your products, and tell FoxEE which one(s) your products are in. This will add the FoxEE interface tab to the publish/edit area, where you control pricing and other information. Because these are also regular EE weblogs, you can pull data from them wherever and however you would for any other weblog, including creating relationships and pulling by category/date/whatever. We have photos that are related to the articles—so that they are displayed with the relevant article, but also have their own “add to cart” links.

Do take a look through the documentation at HCC. They have screenshots of the interface that should hopefully give you a better idea of how the nuts and bolts are arranged. If you’re looking for something specific that’s not covered in that, I’ve found Mike & Brian to be really responsive to their forums and email.

The site I’m working on is Religion News Service—the site is still technically in beta (meaning I haven’t made my way through their list of zillion requests and figured out how to do it all yet), but the articles/photos area is pretty much how it’s going to be.