Users as products

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14 years 3 weeks ago #2956

I'm starting an online business but the product will need installed by a local HVAC professional. My thought was to add each professional's company as a product item (an installation) then at checkout I can use related items as a list of local installers based on zip code. Does this sound like a good application for HikaShop? I have not installed HikaShop yet.

I anticipate my categories to be:
Products - product, install kits
Installers - list of professionals. Price is set.
Wholesale products - same as products but viewable only to resellers because of wholesale pricing.

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14 years 3 weeks ago #2966

Mmmm.
As you probably figured on the other threads you posted, HikaShop cannot yet handle different groups of users.

For a list of local installers, you could cheat the system by using shipping methods as a mean to select local installers based on the state/country entered by the user (you can also modify the zones to display areas instead of states and use those areas as zone limitations for shipping methods.
It's not straight forward though, as it wasn't built to be used that way. Plus, if you have at the same time real products that you want to ship which real shipping methods, then, you need to make sure that you will display one time of shipping methods and not the others by using a big difference in weight in order to set both apart but then if the user tries to buy an installer and a kit on the same order, it won't be able to display both....

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14 years 2 weeks ago #3109

I was going to ask a question which I think you just answered:

Can I have different pricing for different user groups?

I.e., I was going to use HikaShop to allow exisiting customers to purchase and pay for our products online. Some customers have different pricing lists compared to the standard prices. Is there someway of doing this?

A very round about way of doing this would be to create a new user group in Community Builder and give them their own pages, only viewable by them with the products on them. The problem with this is it would be very time consuming to setup for each new customer.

Thoughts?

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14 years 2 weeks ago #3115

It's always possible to have different products in different categories and display one tree of products for a menu which will be seen by users of one group (you can limit a menu or a module to a group in joomla) and another menu seen by another group.

But the best I think, will be to wait as we are currently working on implementing ACL support within HikaShop to allow you to restrict prices and products to groups of joomla users.

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14 years 4 days ago #4021

I may have found a workaround using CB and the generate HTML link from HikaShop add product page. I make each installer a product item then use their HTML in a read only editor field in their profile. Then I create a CB list of "authors" with installers given the author privileges. I then display the custom add to cart field as a list item. Getting all the visibility just right is a challenge. I also used this technique with a custom CB tab to add wholesale price links. I can get away with this because I only have 2 items for retail sale which get their own product page link in the menu and their own add to cart link in my articles. Plus authors on my site have no way to author anything.

Actually this description is a bit brief. I hope to get the whole step by step process down on paper then I can post the details. I just hope my wholesale customers don't mind placing their order from a tab in their CB profile.

Last edit: 14 years 4 days ago by bthayer.

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