American Made Style is a women's (currently) apparel site, featuring products that are made in the USA.
We chose Ubercart due to its ability to easily handle both affiliate products and "for sale" products. Most other systems do not have the templating flexibility to handle this easily. Through CCK and Contemplate, I was able to make a system that was easy for the site admin to handle, and ensured consistency in delivery. We looked at Magento and others, but could not find an easy answer for the co-existence of our affiliate and regular products. One or the other is pretty easy...both in the same system gets hard real fast.
The site was a nice exercise in Views, Panels and a number of other Drupal modules. We would still like to see more attention paid to the cart administration. In particular, I'd be interested in hearing tips on how Ubercart site admins handle doing things in bulk (like print invoices, change order status, etc). Also, we have a unique tax situation, described in this post that we have not yet solved:
http://www.ubercart.org/forum/support/6603/sales_tax_ma_only_part_produc...
Our biggest ongoing challenges include handling taxonomy & the menu system. We love the flexible taxonomy structure that Drupal/Uber offer, but we are still working on the best ways to take advantage of this to suit our needs.
While I appreciate all of the work that goes into Ubercart, there are a few things that I see as glaring omissions from a functionality standpoint:
1. Handling Sales & Discounts - this is something that should be a core feature, at both the product and category (taxonomy) level. Admins should be able to set sale prices as a dollar or percentage discount with start and end dates. This is quite standard in most ecommerce systems.
2. Same issue regarding Taxes - this mod needs some help, though admittedly taxes are an incredibly complicated thing to handle.
3. Again, in general the "bulk" handling of products, orders and other items.
4. With all of the modules it takes to get things running, it seems that the site runs a bit slow. I have taken the steps most have suggested in the forums, but it still seems a bit bogged down. I think some of it might be due to our host not handling all of those http calls efficiently, and I am experiment with a new host. Suggestions welcome.
Lastly, thanks to all in the Uber and Drupal community who work so hard to provide products for others to use. I have long been a vocal advocate for open source products, and Ubercart's community has given me another reason to spread the word. Your work is very appreciated!
Thanks,
Dave L.
Re: American Made Style
Dave, you've put together a very sharp looking site. I appreciate you taking the time to talk about your experience and provide some general feedback for Ubercart. We'll certainly take your comments into account as we decide where and how to spend our development time. There are certainly things we can do better in the core to either solve some of the holes you mentioned or enable contributors to more easily tap into the inner workings of the cart. Regarding your particular tax problem, I'm not sure how we can easily accommodate alterations of the taxable price through the Wf-ng or related systems, but you should be able to take advantage of a recently added hook_calculate_tax(). Documentation is sparse at this point, but you can see example implementations in uc_taxes.module and uc_cybersource.module.
Thanks!
Hi Ryan,
Thanks for your comments and your quick response. I continue to be shocked at how fast people generally respond - you don't get that from commercial software for sure!
My tax problem is pretty odd, and really more of a reflection on the unnecessarily complicated laws of Massachusetts rather than a limitatin of Uber. While I love to solve the problem through technology, sometimes the good answer is "suck it up, and write the check later." If I were more of a programmer, I probably could have created either a workflow rule or a CCK field for "taxable price", and then made the tax hook look for that conditionally. Fact is, that's just out of my league. I'm not sure what the answer is, I was just hoping someone else already had the same problem.
Looking forward to the D6 version as well - Uber was really the only reason we went D5.
In addition to Magento (and Zen/OSc which are kind of a nightmare to administer), check out Candypress for a functionality comparison. While not open source, it's an affordable one that does the basics extremely well from an admin standpoint. Maybe you will get some ideas there?
Impressive
Thanks for sharing your experiences with us. I found it fascinating to see that you have multiple areas on the front page with articles.