Hi,

I'm having a client who uses couch cms already and is now considering an e-commerce implementation. However I'm wondering what couch can and cannot do. I guess most of them can be done, but not sure about everything when skimming through the info.

What we want to build: Basically a straightforward shop...

FRONT-END
products
overview of shoes and a detail page when clicked upon.
with filter options (eg. size, colour, new,…)
in/out of stock

login
possibility for a new client to create an account, login or resend password (when lost)
possibility for an existing client to alter his user information (eg. when moved to other address)

shopping cart
update/delete articles
checkout (possibility for other payment gateways eg. ogone ?)
shipping options, if possible different for other countries

promotions
promotion per article or as a percentage on everything


BACK-END
- client configuration (check for details of customers and alter if needed)
- maintenance of products (add/delete/update)
- overview orders
- status sold articles (orderer/delivered,…)
- handle shipping costs in the admin
- handle promotions and attach them to articles
- handle stock

general questions:
- How are orders handled via couch ecommerce? Is the ecommerce option simply put only some sort of payment option towards customer-shop that sends the info via mail and needs to be handled manually offline? But what about keeping track on stock of products, customer info and in case of lost mails.

I think the frontend will be ok, but the backend worries me a bit…
If not, will the future update 1.5 (with CRM support) I believe, be able to assist a bit more on the cases mentioned above? And if so, will upgrading later on be simple to do without getting into too much trouble breaking things up?

Thanks for any feedback regarding this...

[KK]

Hi Divian,

We are not there yet when it comes to providing a full-fledged e-commerce solution.
But, we are getting there and, I think, with 1.5 we should be able to implement all the points you mentioned.

Thanks KK,

I've read through the docs and I suppose we could still handle a few shortcomings (in current version) ourselves in PHP I suppose eg. linking to other payment gateways,...? From what I could understand, couch still gives flexibillity to do so without ruining things for future updates? Could you confirm this please.

Maybe a bit fast on this one but what time period should I keep in mind regarding the possible update to 1.5? Are we speaking about a few months or a year or… Just to know what to expect approximatly.

[KK]

The key missing feature that is holding us back right now is frontend user registration.

@cheesypoofs recently submitted module (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7939) has pointed out the right way for us to move forward and work has already begun.
So, it won't be long now.

Once we have the users module, the cart module will get the missing 'order management' and 'customer management' features.
With that done, absolutely all the points you mentioned in the first post will be possible in CouchCart.

Coming to your question, if you wish to go ahead and use CouchCart the way it stand right now -
you may do so but then you'll have to do without the order/customer management functionality. If however you can do so for the time being, I don't see any problem in upgrading to the next version when it comes.

As for the payment gateway, yes you can code up your own - just copy the 'payment_gateway' function from cart.php over to cart_ex.php (thus overriding the original gateway function) and now you can modify it to handle whatever gateway you want. All the data pertaining to the cart will be available.

Hope this answers your query.

Thanks KK. Happy to hear couch is moving towards this direction as well.

I'm still considering my options here but...
For the time being, can we just create extra tables that are missing in the couch database (eg. customTable_customers) and create custom queries interacting between both the custom and couch tables to be addressed in the front-end?

Further, is it possible to let those custom_tables be integrated somewhere in the backend one way or another? I'm curious if eg. we could create some sort php module ourselves with custom queries and integrate that into the same back-end for the same look and feel. Let's assume we wanted to create a custom report sections for super-admin. Could the couch backend integrate this directly (like an addon or something) or could it be via a link and opening a modal or new page?

As couch is really brilliant from time to time I'm willing to expand it with custom options but can't figure out what the possibilities are here and without conflicting for future updates. In a way I suppose I'm really asking how plugins for couch interact and should be added. Maybe there's even an option on how to create custom couchlike tags for it to be used in the code instead of php.

Could you clarify this out KK, since that might be the missing link towards how I really should interact and see future options for couch usage… Hence maybe people could start expanding it with plugins even more with this kind of information.

I might be thinking too far ahead but I like to keep my options open and see where to expand my knowledge for the future.