Ubercart

The Organic Centre is the largest supplier of organic training in Ireland. It has a physical shop, and the online shop carries the same products - books, garden supplies and seeds. All the Centre's courses are also sold through Ubercart online. Stock levels are used for physical stock, and are also used to ensure courses aren't oversold. Shipping quotes are used for all shippable items, every item in the catalogue has a weight, and shipping is purely by weight bands.

Courses are given at 3 different venues, these were created as products with a CCK date field and a taxonomy that specifies venue. When a course is given at more than one venue, I did NOT try to use a clever way of using the same product and allowing the user to specify venue (with different attributes for example). I wanted to keep the stock levels for each separate and also make life easier (my experience with hacking the discount module was enough!). Also, when I set it up I didn't know much about attributes, which possibly could have done the job, even keeping the separate stock levels.

A very hacked version of the Discount module is used so that users who are Friends (members) of the Centre receive a blanket 10% discount on all purchases except memberships and gift vouchers. I know that Discount has since been taken on and is maintained, but at the time it was a very dodgy bit of code. For now it does most of what I want, except giving people discounts when they buy more than one of a series of courses.

VAT (European sales tax) is not separately computed; prices are listed "including VAT". For internal accounting purposes, however, separate product classes were created, one or more for each VAT category. This is invisible to the end user, but allows custom reports to be written to list sales by VAT rate (Ireland has 3 VAT rates and sellers must report these to the tax man separately).

If you have any questions or suggestions about the site, I'd be more than willing to hear. It was my first Ubercart site so a lot of learning was involved. The good news is that despite any shortcomings to my approach, they are doing a steadily growing business online, a good thing for a non-profit charity in this economic climate.

The feedback from my client and their customers has generally been very good about the end user experience and the admin interface. Because we only have 1 payment option (paypal), I did have to modify the payments area of the checkout page - the Paypal area has only 1 option but it still displays, and also shows logos of the various credit cards that paypal accepts. People were trying to click on these logos! I removed them and modified somem of the wording.

Mike Cahn
Indytech
Wicklow, Ireland
info@indytech.ie