Hi Folks,

I sent an e-mail to Sales and I’m awaiting the reply, but thought I ought to post it here too. Since sending the e-mail I’ve discovered a few answers elsewhere on-line, but I’ll essentially paste the e-mail here to see what guidance you gurus might offer.

Thank you for any help. (Sorry for the long first post here.)
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I’ve been reading quite a lot on the forums and have looked through the showcase sections and tutorial videos. I do not find an example of what I need to accomplish and wonder if EE is an appropriate tool for my task. The closest I found in your showcase is a photography site which shows some calendars and other photos; clicking “Buy Now” navigates to the detail page; clicking “Buy Now” on that page places the item in the PayPal cart. This would suggest that some of what I need is possible.

I need to build a commerce site with the following:

1. Home page with navigation to product categories (I assume this is easy).

2. Upon selecting the category the visitor needs to see a “gallery” of sorts which will have a photo (thumbnail) of the products and a short description.

3. Filtering of products via tags or similar, i.e. visitor might specify size, color, etc. to narrow the visible items in the selected category list. Sub-categories will be appropriate for some items, but further filtering is needed.

4. Clicking on a product item of interest navigates to a “detail” page with a more detailed description, larger image, etc., and an “Add to Cart” link.

5. Paypal cart is not appropriate, so need to integrate a full-fledged cart tool. Paypal will be an option, but not primary tool. Can you suggest something that plays nicely with EE?

6. Bread crumbs on each product page (I believe this is in place).

7. Would love to have a checkbox on products so that visitors could check items of interest and then re-filter to show only checked items. Is there a way to do this without too much coding?

I’m comfortable in (X)HTML, CSS, some Database (lots of dBase3/FoxPro/FileMaker experience, some mySQL). Zero PHP. Some JavaScript. Willing to read or learn what’s needed.

Sooooo, am I looking in the right place before I start a trial process? And will the Core app allow for enough features to experiment or is it too limited for this type of project to test this?

Oh, and actually total products available at any one time will likely not exceed 500-600, though items already sold will be stored indefinitely and not visible to the public. Each item is one-of-a-kind and there will only be 20-60 items in any one category at a time (with the exception of two larger categories).

Thank you.

Edit to add: last night I discovered the site www.thecity.org (The City Church) as well as the developer’s blog, and I see that some of what I’m needing is implemented there (in their Bookstore, etc.). Any other feedback would be greatly appreciated.

EE will handle all the content for you as you describe but 5. shopping cart payment functions and 7. product filter by checkbox would require some custom work/modules.

In all honesty I think you’d be better off with a good purpose shopping cart system that does everything out of the box.

Rob,

Thank you for your reply.

I expected that the #7 item would require a script and I can work through that eventually (I think) and I do understand how a eCommerce shopping cart app. might be OK, but I’ve not found one that does other items planned for the project so would be linking to those without integration. Items such as a blog and future forum are on that list.

If there’s an elegant cart system that is recommended I’m all ears. Hand coding many of the pages for this project is straight forward, it’s the Gallery/catalogue stuff that I’m looking at EE to help make the whole site more cohesive. But if EE is not the right tool for such a project then I have no problem continuing my search. There are many things which I do like about EE and I’m willing to learn ways to make it work if it doesn’t just turn out to be a huge kludge for picking the wrong tool.

Edit: I have looked at SecureNetShop and other 3rd party shopping cart packages for #5 on my list above. That seems the correct path for the cart problem.

For the cart end http://www.phpcart.net/ support most popular payment gateways. It’s not a full shopping system, it just handles the shopping basket, payment and order logging. The beauty of it is that you add items to the cart using a text link which you can easily generate using EE.

Thank you, Rob (bluedreamer). I have not looked at phpcart, but will do so. I appreciate the tip.