Hey, all. I recently took on an ecommerce website and, being happy with Drupal so far as a CMS and seeing many people favoring the Ubercart module, thought I'd do the site with Ubercart. It's for a wedding services company that rents tablecloths, chair covers, dinnerware, and that sort of thing. However, the client is requesting some fairly complex workflows beyond a simple add-to-cart-and-ship-it, and from what I've seen of Ubercart and its modules so far, I'm not sure if/how all this can be done. Advice on which modules to use, or links to tutorials on the following topics, or if you even want to point me to another platform like ZenCart or OSCommerce that might handle these sorts of tasks better, are very much appreciated. If this is out of Ubercart's reach for the moment, I'll just have to write the app myself, but I'd like to avoid that if I could.
- Customer must be able to place a deposit to reserve the order a certain amount of days prior to the event date. Vendor must be able to demand the rest of the payment on the day the items are received.
- Vendor must be able to estimate shipping time with USPS and FedEx, be notified when items arrive, be notified when items are sent back, and charge a fee for each day the customer keeps the items beyond the agreed return date.
- Vendor must be able to cancel orders and, optionally, provide a refund if the cancellation date is not too close to the scheduled event date.
- Vendor must be able to provide arbitrary refunds (for example, if the customer paid for an item that never arrived).
- Vendor must be able to charge arbitrary fees after the initial deposit and the rest of the payment have been received. (For example, for items that are returned damaged or not returned at all.)
- Customer must be able to change the quantities (and therefore, cost) of the ordered items after they are reserved but before they are shipped. Vendor must be able to charge a fee for quantity changes that are too close to the scheduled event date.
- Vendor must be able to accept payment by non-electronic means but still create and save the order in the system. (For example, a customer who mails their order form and payment.)
A lot of that seems to boil down to just being able to charge more money after the fact, or at specific times. That sounds like the vendor would need to keep the customer's credit card info, and I really don't want to get my hands that dirty with security. This is a small family-owned company, and they aren't the tech-savviest people in the world, so a solution that would require the least amount of future tech support and IT costs would be preferable.
Thank you in advance,
Pedro G. Acevedo