Hi Richard, Richard wrote: > I'm in Australia and am involved with the manufacturing industry, but > that's an obscure case study. How about a book store? >
Good example - not so heavy on the options, but I'm confident I know what the basic requirements are there. >> I suggest that we have a bit of a brainstorm and see if we can't arrive at >> some sort of consensus on that. > Agreed. > >> - Merchandising (cross-sell, up-sell etc.) > How would this work? List related products to current one? > By "up-sell" I mean a higher-value alternative product that the merchant would prefer the shopper to buy /instead/. In a book store, perhaps selling a hardback instead of a paperback, or a boxed set instead of a single volume. In the case of an up-sell, the merchant might want the link to be uni-directional (e.g. no "down-sell" from hardback to paperback!) or not. By "cross-sell" I mean a complementary product that the merchant would like the shopper to buy /in addition/ to the product being viewed. In a book store, perhaps selling another book by the same author. In the case of a cross-sell, the link would usually be bidirectional. >> - Catalogue navigation (beyond a simple category hierarchy) > Would catalogue be the default view of each category? > Also multiple level categories so you could browse the "Non-fiction" > category or a more specific sub-category such as "Politics". > I'd go further than that: the way we did it in the last store product I had a hand in was to allow any product to be in any number of categories, and any /category/ to be in any number of other categories. This gives a "network" model for navigation in the product catalogue, as opposed to a "hierarchical" model. In a book store, "Anarchism" might be within /both/ "Politics" and "Philosophy", and so in each of them there could be a link to "Anarchism", and in "Anarchism" there might be links to both of them (e.g. the links would be bi-directional). >> - Options (Size, colour, accessories and the cost build-up associated with >> them) > Definitely - something like an options table linked to product with a > description and price of each addon. And some Javascript to update the > total price dynamically. > Spot on. >> - Shipping (carriage calculations, tracking) > There's a few settings defined in the info table about shipping. > Tracking would require user accounts so they could login to check or > receive email updates, wouldn't it? > Depends - some carriers only need the consignment no. for tracking (dpd.co.uk who have just delivered me a mobile phone do that), so all that would be needed in that case is a per consignment slot for the no., and a per carrier mechanism for building the URL to view the tracking info. Re. Shipping, the simple case is just banded by weight, but there might be size issues as well. In both cases, we need to keep the generic solution nice and simple - the fiddly cases might be /very/ fiddly! >> - Multiple payment options. > Definitely credit card and paypal. Others? > So you think Paypal integration would be relatively easy. Working off > the existing paypal appliance? (http://www.web2py.com/appliances/ > default/show/28) > Have not looked at the appliance yet, but have done PayPal integrations before (working with Zope and Plone - it was actually in a Plone site, but the payment stuff I did at the Zope level. Not sure about others - some are simple (WorldPay was nice and simple last time I looked), but we should probably stick to Google and PayPal until we have a real use-case for anything more complex. > I would be more than satisfied if we had the above feature set. I think it covers the main points - I'd be happy. The only addition I'd like to consider is membership and membership discounts. > Shall we keep the discussion public in case others want to come on > board? > (These people expressed interest before: Massimo, Yarko, Mr admin, > eric cs, Vidul, viniciusban, JohnMc, weheh) > Public is best - on the list for now, but we'll need to set up some sort of web resource so we can publish the spec at some point. -- Regards, PhilK Email: [email protected] 'a bell is a cup...until it is struck' --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "web2py-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/web2py?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
