By dckantor on
I have a two part question:
A. I am creating a site which will have a commerce section (printed materials, CDs, DVDs, downloads) and wonder whether the e-commerce module or ubercart is more likely to work well. What questions should I ask myself to help me choose?
B. If I create the commerce section of the site is it easy to mix together free downloads and not-free purchases? So if one chooses a free download if download right away but if one chooses a for pay CD a regular shopping cart process begins?
Thanks
Comments
Is Ubercart or e-Commerce right for me?
Disclaimer: I am an Ubercart developer.
A. I can not speak for e-commerce, but Ubercart should work well for you. Questions you should ask: Which one(s) support my payment gateway? Which one am I (or my techie) more familiar with?
B. Ubercart can do this well. In Ubercart you can have one product which (via attributes) can be purchased as both a digital file, and a physical good. So if you are selling The Beatles White album, you can create one product where the user chooses to purchase it as a CD (Ubercart asks for a shipping address, calculates shipping, etc. . .) or a digital file (Ubercart emails a link for the file download, saves a link in the user's account etc. . .)
I don't know for certain since I am not as familiar with the e-commerce module as I should be, but I believe your desire to sell a product as both a physical and digital product may cause Ubercart to be the correct choice for you.
Here are a couple of positive reviews of Ubercart which may help you to choose:
http://www.topnotchthemes.com/blog/080916/7-reasons-why-ubercart-right-c...
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/resources/product_reviews/article.php/118...
-Andy
Restaurant Equipment
2 follow ups
Thanks for the info - I have two follow up questions.
1. How far off is a Drupal 6 version (the rest of my site is up and I'm waiting on the commerce stuff)?
2. Current setup (non Drupal site) is that when purchase is made secure site work is handled by Viaklix and University of Wisconsin IT. Also if its a domestic purchase it just goes through but if it's international then a quote request is sent to a particular e-mail. Would I be able to setup that sort of thing with Ubercart?
Thanks
1. Ubercart is close. I
1. Ubercart is close. I will try to be conservative in my estimates. We should have a beta (usable) in a month or so and a final release before the end of the year.
2. "secure site work" can mean different things, but I will try to give an accurate answer. If you want SSL encryption on your checkout pages, you will need your own certificate. Ubercart will not work if you want to have your store at www.example.com and checkout at secure.viaklix.com. If you are talking about credit card processing, you will need to use a payment gateway supported by Ubercart such as authorize.net or cybersource.com. It is likely that Ubercart supports the payment gateway you (Viaklix) are currently using, but I can't say for sure. You will almost certainly require cooperation from Viaklix to get it to work. I apologize for the generality of this answer, but I need to know more specifics about the services Viaklix / University of Wisconsin provides.
Using Ubercart and Workflow-NG you should be able to automatically process domestic orders, and just email notification on international orders if that is what you are asking. If I have not answered your question, please give more detail on "just goes through."
Peace,
-Andy
Restaurant Equipment
some details
The site (babcock.cals.wisc.edu) is currently built with dreamweaver and Lasso. The shopping cart is all built (I wasn't here - I don't know why they did it this way) in Lasso Studio.
Currently shoppers choose items on line,
go to checkout where they enter non secure info (name address etc)
then when they choose to pay they are sent to a page run by UW's IT division:
charge.doit.wisc.edu/babcock/cgi-bin/charge.cgi
where the cgi scripts are housed.
After the purchase is made in this manner we get notification from viaklix (i'm honestly not sure what they are doing).
If more details are needed to know if I can use ubercart please let me know.
thanks
It sounds like the people at
It sounds like the people at charge.doit.wisc.edu have written an interface to viaklix. Ubercart will not be able to talk to charge.doit.wisc.edu without some custom code, but Ubercart can talk directly to viaklix via this module: http://www.ubercart.org/contrib/2464 . You will need access to the viaklix account but otherwise it should be no problem.
Peace,
-Andy
Restaurant Equipment
details for ubercart question
Here's what I now know. The UW DoIT will be switching to CashNET for payments. A sample of the page that needs to be sent to CashNET is here:
body
span class="sans"
P
You will be transferred to the CashNET payment site in 5 seconds. If you are not automatically transfered, please click the button below.
form method="post" action="https://commerce.cashnet.com/COLAB" name="myCashNet"
input type="hidden" name="ref1type1" value="TRANS_ID"
input type="hidden" name="ref1val1" value="%=1"
input type="hidden" name="ref2type1" value="ORDER_NUMBER"
input type="hidden" name="ref2val1" value="%=2%"
input type="hidden" name="ref3type1" value="DOIT_CHNAME_G"
input type="hidden" name="ref3val1" value="Test User"
input type="hidden" name="Addr" value="USER ADDRESS"
input type="hidden" name="City" value="USER CITY"
input type="hidden" name="State" value="WI"
input type="hidden" name="Zip" value="53029"
input type="hidden" name="Email" value="jcrucius@wisc.edu"
input type="hidden" name="itemcode1" value="COLAB-PAY"
input type="hidden" name="amount1" value="1"
input type="submit" value="Continue --"
/form
!--#include file="../footer.asp"--
script language="javascript"
setTimeout("document.myCashNet.submit()",40000)
/script
I've been told that as long as my site can send these fields to CashNET or failing that send them on to UW's Dept of IT (DoIT) and they can write some code to send it all should work. Will the upcoming version of Ubercart let me do this sort of thing?
Thanks much for your continued help.
Any release date
Anyone know if there is an expected release date for ubercart for drupal 6?
I see it's out now.
A year later ...
The college I work for is moving to Cashnet now, so I was wondering if you ever got it working with UberCart. I've been assured we'll have some developer time if we need it, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel if you got it working.