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coming back to ubercart?

Submitted by avolve on Fri, 09/14/2007 - 21:58
avolve
Posts: 15
 Joined: 09/14/2007

I had a play with Ubercart in its early days (as well as e-commerce) for a concept site. Now i am looking at options for an artists site. They sell one-off artworks and keep them online as examples of their work afterwards. They also sell (at a lower rate) copies of some originals.

What i am hoping to achieve with a site is a display of the artworks (i had intended on a view using a grid, though it seems this is no longer in the views bonus pack module??) that would change from listing a price/purchase link to 'sold' once the piece is sold. This is my basic aim with the site - quite simple.

As an extension of this, i was hoping to create another field (cck, views), or other method(?), to link to an order form for a print of the artwork (if available). For example, a 'prints available' or 'see if prints available' link that would be specific to each piece.

I know most of these features are very simple/basic though i am having trouble deciding between Ubercart and e-commerce. For example, shipping is included in the price as are taxes, users would not need an account, though the preference is to record their details from the payment process (i.e. into an account for 'returning users'). Payment options would be paypal, etc.

I delved deeply into e-commerce in the early days of the drupal 5 beta, though not since then (it was very much not ready). I was hoping, given e-commerce and Ubercart are very distinct in function and aims, someone could indicate which would be more suitable. I am interested in looking into detail at both in the near future, though do not have enough time to do this for this site.

Any thoughts would be appreciated

thx
c.

ps. the 'store' is only one part of the site.
permalink #1 Sat, 09/15/2007 - 00:10
Ryan

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

Hey, avolve. Pretty sure I remember your account here in the past. Welcome back... things have changed a little since we had a nice big database crash. Sticking out tongue (Honestly, I think the site is in much better condition now. So it wasn't all bad, although it did take up coding time restoring everything.)

Anyways, to answer your question... Given the technical specs you're looking for, I don't know that either package is going to be more specifically suited to the job. I'd be quite happy to convince you that the project would be better done with Ubercart, though. Eye-wink

First, there are a couple inventory contributions floating around that I think will do just fine for you. But that really may be overkill for your situation. You might just add a CCK field for in stock/out of stock for the original pieces and use a simple bit of PHP to get the value for the catalog displays. You can easily get a custom module using hook_order() and the submit $op to mark purchased products as no longer in stock. Granted this isn't a straight module solution, but any module is probably going to be overkill for your application.

Anonymous checkout comes standard w/ Ubercart along with a PayPal Certified module integrating the various PayPal payment services. Most folks tend to prefer the Ubercart back end, and we'd love to continue enhancing it. Also, just the mere fact that our community is growing and there are more and more developers around in a pinch is a great bonus in my opinion. Eye-wink

I think you could make a successful store in e-commerce, but I don't see any clear advantage to it... and I'd love to see one more cool looking Ubercart store. Laughing out loud

permalink #2 Sat, 09/15/2007 - 09:22
jimi089
Posts: 104
 Joined: 09/07/2007
Uber Donor

Personally, Ubercart is like a breath of fresh air compared to e-commerce, both in terms of functionality (even at this alpha stage) and in terms of support. It's a no brainer in favor of ubercart from my perspective.

permalink #3 Sun, 09/16/2007 - 03:49
ulfk@drupal.org
Posts: 28
 Joined: 08/08/2007

My vote would be for Ubercart, I'm fairly sure what you're looking to do will be quicker with Ubercart.

permalink #4 Thu, 09/27/2007 - 07:19
avolve
Posts: 15
 Joined: 09/14/2007

thanks Ryan, I will be starting on this soon.

I will look at inventory options as i am hoping developing this project will assist me in getting a good grip on ubercart for more complex e-commerce applications to come (and i am not much of a php guru! i really need to brush up)

thanks for the links too. It's always good to have examples to reflect on