First of all I want to say thanks for a great product. I have only been testing Satchmo and playing with Django for a few weeks now (pretty damn new to python in general) but really like what I see in Satchmo so far and enjoying the Django framework. I really think that Satchmo is the top choice for what I'm trying to do here and am looking for some input on taking the proper route to customize our web store. Our current home brewed website (http:// www.musicalheritage.com / http://www.jazzheritage.com) was built using the CakePHP framework and is really only a front-end to a legacy HP system which actually handles the credit card processing, shipping, inventory, etc. This really messes with adding new functionality to the site so I would like to standardize on an out of the box shopping cart that is highly customizable. I've listed some of the functionality we would need to move over, we are willing to combine both stores into one and change some of the way we do things if its necessary.
1. We are mostly a mail-order record club so a majority of our orders actually come in through mail. Is there an api or way of entering in batch orders from a csv or such that would actually processes the orders as if they had been input online. Also is there a way to pay for orders after they have been entered. (for example, about once a month we automatically ship our customers a CD in the mail, that order would be automatically entered into their account as an order but the balance would be outstanding, they would come to the site and pay the order with their credit card.) 2. This is my biggest concern (I'm sure #1 can be done pretty easily if its not available out of the box.). Monthly we build catalogs, each catalog you can say is like a category with sub-categories (pages), but they each have a beginning and ending date in which chosen items (from the product tables) are discounted (manual discount prices, not %). I would some how also like to assign these catalogs to groups (like tiered pricing). Basically the products in the catalog sections would mimic tiered group pricing where 'member' would get a discount price until a certain date -- then it would revert to the default price once the sale or catalog has expired. I was thinking of building a catalog app that would have catalogs > sections > products, to update these would I hack something into the 'satchmo_rebuild_pricing' that would update the pricing the same way the tiered pricing does or should I use the price signal and manipulate the prices on the fly. (Notice we also have over 5,000 products and hundreds of products go into a catalog at a time.) 3. PRODUCT DATA -- this one is one of our biggest problems at the moment, the dataset we have is HUGE, we get our CD data from a 3rd party provider that includes all album information, track listings with all contributions information, liner notes, artist bios, etc, etc.. We currently use sphinx for mysql for our search because MySQL would just be way too slow for the 1,000s of CDs and how deep the information goes. My thought was to instead of using this data from mysql, pulling it into CouchDB and using and searching that same data... I thought maybe creating a custom field for the product (ie.. data_doc) or something that would contain the CouchDB document ID and read back all that information on the product page... Artist/composer information that we would want to show in browse mode would simply be additional customizable fields that would get filled in manually or through a script so it wouldn't have to do the additional work of fetching all that data from Couch on ~30 products at a time. Sorry if I have not explained everything as thurougly as possible if you have any questions feel free to ask.. you can also look at our current site to see what I am party trying to simulate (http:// www.musicalheritage.com). How reasonable does this sound and also is anybody from the Satchmo community available for freelancing if we were to outsource some of this to speed up development?
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