Fact Finding Mission: Can Hikashop Do...?

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13 years 11 months ago #3942

Hi All,

I'm on a fact finding mission for our company. We are NOT looking for a retail shopping cart but a shopping cart-like ability.

We are a wholesaler of printed t-shirts and would like to have our Sales Rep "order" shirts on-line as well as show the potential store buyer what they are getting (right now our sales reps use a constantly changing printed catalog and an Excel sheet to place orders. Mistakes are constantly being made)

Here are the overview steps we would like it to do:

1) Sales Rep (with or without buyer) goes to the web page and is presented with, say, 10 shirt colors.
2) Sales Rep clicks on one of the colors and a list of designs for that color pops up
3) Design is selected and the Sales Rep enters in the amount FOR EACH SIZE -OR- (ideally) A total OVERALL order quantity and then enters in the "scale" for the sizes.
(Example: 600 shirts are wanted on a S-M-L-XL range, broken out to a ratio of 1-2-2-1 (1 small, 2 medium, 2 large, 1 xl ratio) so the order ends up 100 Smalls, 200 Medium, 200 Large, and 100 XL - but the Sales Rep only entered in 600 and a 1 for Small 2 for Medium etc.)
The wish of #3 would be NOT TO ADD to Cart for EACH size but to ADD TO CART once for each design (with the order quantity submitted and calculated)

The "scale" is not consistent - The Sales Reps can, for example, sell to one customer 1-2-2-1 while another customer 2-2-5 (no XL) or even 2-2-4-4-2 (throwing in an XS).

4) Sales Rep would have the option to adjust the wholesale unit price from the base wholesale price (for volume, first buy trial price, etc.) - (This could probably be done using the coupon system)

5) Sales Rep submits the order and the order would need to be downloadable (Excel would be preferred).


We are not looking for an "Order Management" system. We need something for the Sales Reps to submit their orders as painlessly (and accurately) as possible.

The owner is looking at having "in-house" programmers (i.e. me) to take a stab at this but, although I know my way around the computer, I would prefer to not re-invent the wheel if all we have to do is some slight modifications to something that already exists.

Let me know if Hikashop is able to accomplish (either out of the box or with slight custom modifications) our above needs.

Thank you for your time,

Dana

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13 years 11 months ago #3945

Hi,

1/ that could be a listing of categories, 1 category per color.
2/ each design could be a product.
3/we have a system of characteristics/variants where you can have for example several sizes for the same product. However, as you can see on that page ( www.demo.hikashop.com/index.php?option=c...ayout=show&Itemid=57 ), you have one add to cart button per variant. If you want to have several input boxes (one per variant) with an add to cart button adding all of them at once, you would have to personnalize the show file of the product view to display the interface yourself the way you need it. It's totally doable if you know php/js enough :)
4/ I don't understand that point ? The price of each product is fixed in the back end by the vendor. The user on the front end cannot decide himself of the price. Sure, he can use coupon codes to apply discounts on the order, but he won't be able to specify the price directly.
5/ The order is actually accessible from the front end orders listing for logged in users. It can be printed (and thus exported as a pdf) but if you need to export it to excel, you will have to write that export function.

The checkout can be customized to remove views you don't need like the payment/shipping, etc by editing the checkout workflow option of the configuration.

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13 years 11 months ago #3948

Thanks for the quick reply.

nicolas wrote:

Hi,

1/ that could be a listing of categories, 1 category per color.
2/ each design could be a product.


That's how I was picturing it when going through the demo so very doable.


3/we have a system of characteristics/variants where you can have for example several sizes for the same product. However, as you can see on that page ( www.demo.hikashop.com/index.php?option=c...ayout=show&Itemid=57 ), you have one add to cart button per variant. If you want to have several input boxes (one per variant) with an add to cart button adding all of them at once, you would have to personnalize the show file of the product view to display the interface yourself the way you need it. It's totally doable if you know php/js enough :)


I know enough to get me in trouble. Reading over the forum, it looks like there is a good support team that could help with questions.

4/ I don't understand that point ? The price of each product is fixed in the back end by the vendor. The user on the front end cannot decide himself of the price. Sure, he can use coupon codes to apply discounts on the order, but he won't be able to specify the price directly.


The "Shopping Cart" will only be accessible to the Sales Reps (not the general public).

Here is an example:

Say the default, per shirt, is $6.00 (we are based in the US)
Sales Rep goes to Store A and sells at $5.50 (and got approval for this price). The "cart" shows a default of $6.00. Can the Sales Rep go in and modify the price to $5.50 OR is there a coupon setting that allows a $0.50 discount per shirt that they would enter (basically, a "confirmation code" to sell the shirt at a lower price)

We would like to be able to have the shopping cart up for the Buyer to see what they are getting and the total price they are going to purchase (instead of a printed catalog that may be out of date).

Does that help understand our needs?

5/ The order is actually accessible from the front end orders listing for logged in users. It can be printed (and thus exported as a pdf) but if you need to export it to excel, you will have to write that export function.


I know how to program for Excel dumps in PHP. Is the HikaShop code simple enough (and commented) to figure out where I would need to enter the code? Is there an option for HikaShop (the company) to customize to meet our needs (i.e. pay you guys some money)?

Thanks again for your help.

Dana

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13 years 11 months ago #3950

4/ You have several ways you could handle it:
have different prices based on a minimum quantity so that when the sales rep add over a certain quantity, the price is lowered automatically. However, the system handles that on a per variant basis.
You could create several coupons in the back end. And then, the sales rep could enter a coupon (or have it automatically loaded in the cart with resitrictions to select the appropriated coupon. For example, over $100, have a 5% coupon on the total, over $200, have a 10% discount).
You can also use discounts which are applied automatically to the product prices directly.
You could also have a special characteristic the sales rep could select which would generate additional variants and set the variant prices based on the value of that characteristic.

Also note that with our CSV import function, you can import all your product data and even update it by reimporting the CSV. That way, you can do mass-changes on the products quite rapidely. So for example, instead of setting prices for each variant manually via the interface, you could have a CSV and mass search-and-replace with notepad++ or excel and then import the modifications in a few clicks.

5/ You can look at the file show of the view order on the front end ( with the menu Display->Views ) where the printed invoice is generated. There is a lot of stuff you can just remove as we use that view for both the order details page and the order invoice.
Mainly, all the data of the order is in the variable $this->element.
We remove automatically all the comments in the code when we package HikaShop in order to reduce its size. The package is already 1MB without comments and we need to stay as low as possible to avoid install issues on small hostings with an upload limit of 2MB and small memory_limit as the joomla unzipping library takes quite a lot of memory. However, the code in that view is quite simple (mainly HTML). If you have questions, you can always ask us.
There is also an option for us to meet your needs :) However, I must say that we never generated any excel file with PHP so you might be better to the task than us.

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13 years 11 months ago #3996

Thanks for all the help.

I will install and take a look.

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