Ubercart solution adequate?
boytaichi - January 21, 2008 - 23:17
I'm looking for a shopping cart solution. In particular, I need,
1. A solution can sell both product and membership.
2. A solution as a shopping mall that different merchants can put up their own stores. When sales happen, the mall charges a commission.
Does ecommerce or ubercart do what I need?
Either should accomplish #1
Either should accomplish #1 out of the box. For #2, you're going to have to seriously consider your setup. People have asked about this before, but it would require some customization of payment modules/workflow to do properly. Essentially, the "mall" site would have to take the full payment and disburse the funds to the merchants less the fee. You'll have to come up with your own way to disburse the funds. Most services, PayPal included, aren't configured to share payments and don't have automated disbursal tools.
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Drupal by Wombats | Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org
thanks, but
are there any mall solutions in drupal or outside of drupal?
Would it be simpler/possible if you trust each shop owner?
Hi rszrama et al,
Are you saying that full payment HAS TO BE taken by the site owner?
If not, how about:
- You allow multiple shop owners to populate their shops with products in the ubercart mall
- You chose to trust the shop owners to pay the commission. They get the full payment for products directly
- The 'turnover' is tracked so that an invoice can be generated to each shop for the commission they owe
Would that make it easier to configure, less customisation?
Sorry if this is a daft suggestion.
Yeah, you could do it that
Yeah, you could do it that way and just remove those merchants from the site if they don't pay their bill. You could also just do it the other way and pay them their commission after the fact and show them a page that tracks what their payouts have been or what their current payout will be. I like this option better from a business standpoint, but you'd know your market better.
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Drupal by Wombats | Current Drupal project: http://www.ubercart.org
Does Ubercart allow multi independent store owners per install?
(Is it OK to put this here? Or should it be on the Ubercart forums?)
Thanks rszrama,
I might not have been clear about the 'trust' idea.
I wanted each site member to be able to have their own store, they administer it, all payment for that store's goods go to them directly. I just have to trust them to pay back say a percentage of their takings from their store.
I don't want them to have to trust each other, so store administration must be restricted to their ID and the site admin or similar role.
Does Ubercart allow the 'shopping mall' configuration , out of the box? ie One installation of Ubercart, segmented into multiple stores, each with it's own administrator AND each store with it's own payments configuration, reporting etc.
So a new site member could set up their own store, with products X and payments to PayPal, another member set up their store with products Y and payments via Google Checkout etc.
I was hoping that the only custom code would be something to track the total sales for each user's store and administrate the commission they owed back to the site owner.
Please could you tell me how much of this would NOT work 'out of the box' ?
.. and whether attempting this with D6 is feasible yet.
Many thanks.
(I have a specific use for this which we might discus if you are interested?)