Initial Ubercart Release (new e-commerce package)

I commented on this in the Ubercart forums here: http://www.ubercart.org/forum/uberthink/174/multiple_domains_ii_multiple...
The short version of this long post is that people mean a lot of things when they say multiple stores. Ubercart does shared code base for completely different sites now because Drupal does it. Ubercart will do multiple sites with different themes, similar product sets, and one or multiple back ends (administration and order fulfillment) in the near future because we need them done to move our production sites over to Ubercart. We think these are the most common desired configurations. If you want some other sort of multi site, ask on our forums about it.
Peace,
-Andy

and starting answer some of my own questions..

2a) it looks like you have ups shipping and a variety of other customizable methods. cool!
looks like you have tax config as well. cool!

Regarding the taxes. if i'm going to ship to all 50 states, do i have to go in and configure taxes for each state separately in admin/store/settings/taxes?

If so, since this is a pretty common task most people will have to do, couldn't there be a quick setting to enable this for all states (maybe there is one already). it would mean someone would have to once a year monitor irs guidelines for each state and post a module if any taxrates change. that way when folks install UC, they get the latest 50 state tax rates already setup. i don't know how often state tax rates change but having each user who installs UC configure this seems like a lot of duplicate work. Any thoughts?

Finally, as an internet retailer, do the laws now requier that sellers must tax internet sales to each state?
And if you only sell downloadable materials that are NOT shipped i imagine no tax rules apply (seems obvious but i don't know)?

maybe this tax stuff isn't even an issue (i'm new to online selling)..

thanks

Using UC now and coming up with a few more questions:

PRODUCTS:
========

1) under admin/store/settings/products you have "Display Price". I see where it shows up on the product node view but what does that field actually represent versus the sell price (e.g. what actually determines the value that ends up in that field)? fwiw, it looks like you have it disabled in your livecart.

2) what are store settings 'user initials" used for?

3) is it possible to set the default weight from lbs to ounces? also is it possible to configure the display of a suffix 'lbs" or 'oz' to follow the weight amount in the product view without having to adjust the theme?

4) Lets say i have a product **TYPE** like a music cd. I've set up attributes that i want to be on all products of that type. Maybe i'm not doing this the right way but if i've got 200 CDs by different artists, each of those has to be created as a "new product" to make it available as a product right? That's cool but it also means i have to enable the same attributes EACH TIME i create a new cd product (2 mouse clicks + wait time).

Is there an easier way to do this?. For instance a way to create product TYPES with the attributes already associated with the type by default. That way instead of just creating a generic product from scratch every time via "product>create product", i could create "product>create CD product" with chosen attributes already assigned to it. Hope you follow that.

I imagine this might just be part of biting the bullet to get ones products set up.. But if one is constantly adding products (in this case CDs), it would really be beneficial to have the attributes automatically enabled for a given product 'type'.

POST UPDATE: I just rediscovered your product classes and it looks like they might cover this. However, only if i can associate the attributes WITH THE CLASS. Is this possible? If not, it's a great feature to add to UC!

5) i can create products fine, then list them and view them. however, when i click 'add to cart', i get the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function uc_catalog_node_types() in C:\wamp\www\drupal51\sites\all\modules\UC\ubercart\uc_cart\uc_cart.module on line 1416

Note: i don't have the UC category module enabled because i wanted to work my way out from creating basic products first, getting to know UC, then enabling successive modules and getting familiar with what each does and the settings each provides. I wouldn't think i need to have catalog enabled to use the cart since it's not listed as being required but maybe i do. If so you probably should adjust the "required" settings.

POST UPDATE: I enabled the catalog and this works now. I'm not sure but i think catalog IS REQUIRED for any UC installation to work. If so make it display in the modules panel as 'required'.

ORDERS:
=======

6) Because i can't set anything in my cart, i tried to create an order from scratch. I enabled the 'test gateway'. When i try to create an order i get this error message:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function uc_payment_load_payments() in C:\wamp\www\drupal51\sites\all\modules\UC\ubercart\uc_order\uc_order.module on line 2847

POST UPDATE: I enabled the catalog and this works now. I'm not sure but i think catalog IS REQUIRED for any UC installation to work. If so make it display in the modules panel as 'required'.

However, now when i try to add an order i get:

warning: mysql_insert_id() [function.mysql-insert-id]: A link to the server could not be established in C:\wamp\www\drupal51\sites\all\modules\UC\ubercart\uc_order\uc_order.module on line 2523.

I then enabled the "payment" api module to see if that helped. It seemed to let me create the order. The "text gateway" doesn't state that it requires "payment". does it need to be enabled?

7) Now i'm manually creating an order form. I complete the top half of the form fine. However when i go to "add a product", it brings up two select boxes titled " Select a category:" and "Select a product:". The problem is that the select box that says "Select a product:" doesn't have any products listed in it. Only contains an option "select a category"????

Which leads me back to the earlier question that maybe "product categories" are mandatory for UC to work. Yes?

POST UPDATE: I enabled the catalog and these select boxes now work. I'm not sure but i think catalog IS REQUIRED for any UC installation to work. If so make it display in the modules panel as 'required'. However, now when i actually try to "add to order" the product i have selected in the search box i get this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function uc_product_get_manufacturer() in C:\wamp\www\drupal51\sites\all\modules\UC\ubercart\uc_order\uc_order.module on line 1225

which is kind of odd since i have mfg disabled! actually it looks like it wants mfg TO be ENABLED but i have it turned off much like i got errors because the catalog was turned off. Either these modules are REQUIRED OR the code needs to be cleaned up to run without them without generating errors.

CHECKOUT
========

8) I can pull up the checkout form and populate the fields but it never lets me actually checkout. There's no submit button only "review order" and "cancel" buttons.

NOTE: *** This might be a bug. If i'm on checkout and hit "review order", once i go back to checkout i have to refill in all of the "delivery information" again (e.g. ship to and bill to infomration ) even though the cart and other aspects of the checkout form maintain their fields.

9) I'm not sure but not being able to checkout (#8) might be because my "calculate shipping cost" doesn't seem to do anything. i've tried to configure that but it doesn't seem to do anything?

10) i've tried enabling the "test gateway" and it doesn't seem to do anything. that part of the configuration is a little confusing. the only options i have on checkout are pay by cash or check?

CATEGORY (MENU) BLOCK
======================

11) My product categories are 2 levels deep. Is there any way to:

a) make the top level category (or any other level) expanded like you can do with menu items so a user does NOT have to click to see the categories contained within? Without that the category block is going to be somewhat limited imho. you want customers to see all your cats right away otherwise they can't find what they're looking for and leave.

b) is there a way to remove the number of items displayed after the ONLY THE TOP level category (e.g. looks similar to "(2)")?

For me this is just personal preference and probably intuitively many customer's prefer as well. I personally don't care how many products i have under the category. In fact if i have only one product, it looks kind of silly to post a "(1)" after the category. It clutters up the space and provides relatively little value add. Now if i had 200 products some might want that number. But even then, i'm not sure *i* would want it.

c) is there a way to remove the number of items displayed after ALL category terms (e.g. looks similar to "(2)") if i want? for the same reasons i posted in 11b.

d) if i don't have a product in a category is it possible to still display the category in teh category block. I might want to let customers know that we WILL be carrying functionality in those categories in the near future. Or maybe we are just updating that category line with new products but haven't filled them in yet?

I'm sure all of this stuff is configurable. It just needs to have a configuration page with the ability to save the settings and pass them into your taxonomy display function that's populating the block. Now the question is do you think it's important enough to add? I do :-)..

IMPLEMENTATION QUESTION
======================

12) Lets say i sell cds or books. what i would call "publishable items" that have both an author AND a publisher (additional metadata about the item itself that is usually stored in separate tables). How would you recommend one best goes about configuring that w/ UC?

I see you use taxonomy for mfg and categories. possibly for a cd/book, mfg could take the roll of the publisher (i think it has metadata fields for phone number, address, url, etc). But what if i actually get the CDs from a distributor which actually IS the mfg. Then how would i use mfg as the publisher?

Either way that still leaves the artist/author dangling somewhat. I could create a taxonomy for author/artist but what about the metadata for those entities? for instance, is there a way to attach a bio, url, etc field to the author so that a customer can click on a link to bring up a node with info about the artist/author? or search for all cds by x author (that's currently achieveable if author/artist is defined with taxonomy).

Also, I would like to be able to display the Artist/Author and Publisher as a separate fields in the product node view. Which means it would be preferable to be able to make the artist/author and publisher product select menu fields populated from the artists and publishers table versus taxonomy which sits "outside" the node? I can retheme the product node to reposition the taxonomy links for publisher or artist IN the node body but they become links to taxonomy NOT information about the publisher or the artist. Hope you can visualize what i'm talking about.

Can i add cck fields for artist and publisher to the product node? Possibly they could somehow be foreign keys to another node custom content type for both the publisher and artist?

Anyway, is it possible to achieve "published items" now and if so how would you do it currently? And if not do you have any plans to offer support for 'published items' in the future?

POST UPDATE: I just read more about your product classes and this looks like it might help with #12. I'm trying to wrap my head around how to use / implement / cfg it for the example i gave. If i'm on the right path maybe you can give some pointers. It looks like i can create a "book" class but i don't want to have the author and publisher on that same class. e.g. i want them separate and reusable so that if product 1 and product 2 are both books by the same publisher, i do NOT have to type the same publisher in as repeated text for each product. e.g. i want to simply pull the publisher as a FK in a publisher table. Because i'm not sure how product classes work, i'm not sure i explained that very well but it's basically the same setup i talked about in the inital #12 post.

POST POST UPDATE: I just create a class and see how it works now. however, it only creates text fields which means that i would have to retype the publisher and artist name on every product which means they are repeatedly stored in teh db multiple times. FEATURE REQUEST : Would there be any way to make one of the product class fields be a select menu that is populated by a sql query to another table e.g. an artists or publishers table (you provide the sql query in the field value)! That would do the trick! In fact, you might be able to enable php as the input filter on your current select menu field and if that's set behind the scenes, take the sql input in the field as the query to do the lookup and theme the select box. That would be pretty easy to do. The harder part would be creating the interface for populating the publisher and artist tables and integrating it into your current UC!

FWIW for me #12 is the most important question in this post.

thanks

After trying to enter an order, it appears that a UC customer has basically a 1:1 relationship to a drupal user in the user table (e.g. they are one and the same thing which essentially equates to an email address)

that's fine.

i'm not an expert at this by any means but the ship to and billing info are hardcoded in every order in the uc_orders table. that means that if joe smith orders 20 times, he has to reenter the same info over and over again right? which is prone to error and wastes space right?

wouldn't it make more sense to have a lookup table user_addresses that looks more like this:

uid       shipto         billto
1         xxxxx          xxxxx
2          akdfjkla      kajlkj
etc

basically so that the user addresses primary relationship is to the user and only secondary (FK) on the order..

just curious?

thanks

Although this would conflict with schemes where a sku has already been assigned to a product (e.g. when you resell a product), for businesses that are creating their own products, it would be handy to autogenerate SKUs so that they are NOT reused.

This might simply be the node-> nid since that is always unique.

However, i'm not sure if a sku has to conform to a certain standard like a barcode does or something like that.

Anyway, wanted to get this in before i forgot it.

I'm posting a lot of stuff here ;-) Hope you don't mind.

thanks

Yeah, as rszrama done sez, ecommerce has role_discount (although I've never used it) and now also flexicharge will do this too. I won't say our support is comprehensive though, for example flexicharge doesn't support displaying the altered price on the product (just applies in the cart).