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Can I use UberCart for a site like this (mostly B2B)?

Submitted by venkat-rk@drupal.org on Tue, 07/15/2008 - 02:00
venkat-rk@drupal.org
Posts: 61
 Joined: 03/19/2008

I have a client who specializes in high-end, power backup equipment and has the following site requirements:

  1. They will have a regular corporate site using drupal but are looking to handle their product catalogue through UberCart
  2. Customers will not be directly ordering online (the payments are too huge to make by credit card etc), but will check out the different products and get quotes online for the ones in which they are interested.
  3. Customers will also need to be able to get one consolidated quotation for multiple products
  4. Dealers will need to be able to check their prices (dealer price) for each product and then generate a quote on behalf of the customer where the final price would be different from the dealer's price (CCK field permissions?).
  5. For 2, 3 & 4, the quotes will need to be presented as a PDF that can be saved to the desktop and also emailed. They will also need to be saved to the prospective customer's account for future reference.
  6. The company will need to be able to change the prices of each product whenever they want
  7. Site will feature an order workflow (quotes actually) where customers can choose equipment rating from a drop-down and move through a series of steps/forms and finally have the quotation generated for them.
  8. Site needs an up-selling feature where customers seeking quotes for a particular piece of power backup equipment could be shown the option of purchasing equipment of higher rating (for the same engine model) for some additional cost.

Can UberCart handle these requirements out of the box or will any of the above involve custom coding? Any advice would be greatly appreciated. In sum, the site will be more of a corporate brochure/informational kind of site, with the product catalog and online quotation system being the dynamic elements and subtly integrated.
permalink #1 Wed, 07/16/2008 - 22:10
venkat-rk@drupal.org
Posts: 61
 Joined: 03/19/2008

Sorry to bump, but it would be great if someone could answer these questions Smiling

permalink #2 Thu, 07/17/2008 - 09:45
Ryan

Posts: 5269
 Joined: 08/07/2007
AdministratorHead Code Monkey - I eat bugs.

Don't have time to go into too much detail, but it sounds like you might be able to shoe horn such a system into UC. It would certainly take some custom coding... for example, should the customer add products to the cart and then those get saved as orders for dealers to quote from? How would you restrict access to the orders by dealer? You might be able to put a CCK field permission on something so that dealers can see their special dealer price, but are all dealers getting the same price?

Ubercart wasn't designed with this type of setup in mind, but with some determined coding you could make it work.

permalink #3 Sat, 07/19/2008 - 05:34
venkat-rk@drupal.org
Posts: 61
 Joined: 03/19/2008

You have raised some critical issues I hadn't thought about. Thank you very much!

I will have my developer colleague look into this and take a final call.

permalink #4 Wed, 07/23/2008 - 06:38
venkat-rk@drupal.org
Posts: 61
 Joined: 03/19/2008

Ryan wrote:
Don't have time to go into too much detail, but it sounds like you might be able to shoe horn such a system into UC. It would certainly take some custom coding... for example, should the customer add products to the cart and then those get saved as orders for dealers to quote from? How would you restrict access to the orders by dealer? You might be able to put a CCK field permission on something so that dealers can see their special dealer price, but are all dealers getting the same price?

Ubercart wasn't designed with this type of setup in mind, but with some determined coding you could make it work.

Hello Ryan,

The issue of different prices for different dealers is a tricky one, but for the remaining requirements, do you think the following would work?

Basically, we would build a 'quotations' module (or whatever) using the Ubercart API that would alter UberCart's default checkout behaviour to just generating a quotation for the products added to the cart.

Someone else posted on the forums asking for features similar to ours and they were told to turn off the regular payment and shipping modules. For good measure, we would do that too, but do you think our approach to altering the default checkout behaviour as described above would solve our problem? It seems to me that Ubercart meets all our other requirements (listed in my original post) out of the box.

Thanks,
Venkat