UberCart Marketplace Stores

Sounds like a great idea. I think this would ideally be an add on module to marketplace just like marketplace is an add on to Ubercart.

I would be happy to post a link on the main marketplace project page if you or anyone else come up with such a module. In fact I'm beginning to think there should be a list of member contributed marketplace modules on the main page. There are a couple of others in the works...

Cheers. I'll leave this open for others to comment on.

Hi guys. I'll be tossing emfluence's collective hat into this pile.

We've got a client setup with ubercart marketplace, and will be needing the ability to do things very similar. We came up with the organic groups solution as on our own as well. Right now, we've got other concerns, but we want this too. We could possibly put a bounty on it if someone's interested, or take up development of some features in the future.

Our specific needs so we have comparison points for features:

• All users could create a store if given permission (so views can have a standard data point to pull from)
• Stores would be an organic group, with users. Permissions via OG group specific roles would grant access to the following things areas:
  • Content Editor (handled by group post & wiki content types by default) for pages, and perhaps "forums".
  • Product Field controls to separate stock from pricing from shipping.
  • Order fulfillment for my items
  • Order fulfillment for my group
  • Financials and reports for my items
  • Financials and reports for my group
  • The ability to take control of a product by another group member from the current author. Needed for when an employee of a retailer who registered a product is fired.
• An extra optional field on products that allows a product to be put into a group. Handled by default, but would need a bit more.. elegance.

Reviewing my own list, it almost feels like this would be a major change to marketplace itself. Users would still be selling. But the "store" would no longer be the user, but instead the group. I am not sure this can be handled correctly through a contributed module. Maintainers, any feeling on this?

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but in marketplace, the "cash register" (as it were) is centralized by the site, and its contents periodically disbursed among the various "stores" via PayPal MassPay.

Is there a reason why the site needs to get in the middle like this? Is it simply the business model of the developers, or is that the way e-commerce needs to work?

I can't think of anything in this thread that calls for separate "cash registers." Stomper and I are both targeting ways to give each seller increased functionality and presence. The actual checkout process makes sense the way it is now..

Perhaps my choice of metaphors was poor. I'm expressing two requirements: (1) direct payment from buyer to seller, without the site taking a commission on sales, and (2) defaulting shipping address to the seller. So far as I can tell, neither are possible. Am I wrong?

UPDATE If this functionality doesn't exist in marketplace, I'd be happy to tackle a module if I could get a few pointers on the hooks to think about.

On the shipping address, I was unclear. I want the "Ship From" address to be defaulted to the seller, and not the site.

For the rest, I can make another issue (done); what I'm aiming toward has come up before, but not here.

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great discussion, i would greatly appreciate this functionality as well. I'm going to install organic groups (never knew it existed until now) and see how that interfaces with this module.

My use case is a product dealer website with resellers in different locations across the US. Each reseller would ideally have their own "location" page with their uploaded products listed for sale and sortable.

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Oh wow, happy to see an explosion of requests for this sort of functionality. I could have sworn I made a post that said I was working on something of the sort (apparently I didn't), but I indeed do presently have a solution to conceptual stores by way of nodes selling products instead of users selling products. An individual user owns the node and receives notifications of new orders and can manage the orders for each node/store and what not. It is not super advanced yet, but it is a decent springboard towards a full solution. I have made a number of modifications that I do not recall at this time because it was a couple weeks/months ago, but at some point in the next week or two I'll see if I can make a patch.

I'd love to test this, or even help if you need help. I did make an issue for this, but it got no takers, so I'll repeat here. I think everybody on this thread wants at least one of these two things:

(1) Direct payment from buyer to seller (and not the the site taking a commission on sales)

(2) Defaulting "Ship From" address to the store (and not the site)

And the proposed solution supports them, yes?

I'm not a whiz either... But if one of the module developers would point me to a hook and a task, I'd be happy to help. Or testing. Whatever! I really need this...

Incidentally, it never occurred to me to make an organic group a seller. That's neat. Like a buying club, except for selling!

And there can also be a group of just one, and so the limit case of the single store is handled as well. It's a neat idea.

I am unfortunately not very familiar with organic groups but I have been contemplating checking it out for this project. Presently the project where I have this implemented is entirely based on nodes and while it can probably be converted to organic groups, I would likely have to work on a new install geared towards that. I'll see what I can do.

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Organic groups are implemented as nodes.

If a store is a node then reviews are relatively as easy as node comments no?

Yep. 5 stars, too.

In terms of the ideal features, I think it's all in the OG space except for this one:

- website can set requirements that need to be met inorder for a user to qualify -> ie. certain number of transactions, posts etc.

I'm wondering if this comment shows the way:

User badges creates an action to assign user badges to a user and, using the Rules module, you can make this trigger on a huge variety of conditions. If you need more conditions, you can just contribute extensions to Rules and the framework is all there.

So then all this module would need to do -- if the dependency on badges is OK -- would be to check for the presence of the badge before allowing them to have a store. The badge module + rules would do all of the work.

Just a thought, since I'm neither a badge maven nor a rules maven.

Doing a little research, it looks like rules integration isn't at all impossible, but there's backwash from conditional actions and the D6->D7 transition; it looks like D7 is going back to rules integration. As far as the badges, I'm just trying to adopt functionality created elsewhere, being lazy...

I saw. FWIW, I think if we get the rules architecture right, future pain will be minimal. I can take a look at this, maybe even tomorrow, if that will help move the larger project off square one. Then again, one could just retreat entirely.

Stomper: Looks like can handle the use case, when integrated with userpoints?

@34 Stomper, I installed ubercart_userpoints 6.x-2.x-dev (just updated yesterday) and Userpoints 6.x-1.1 which includes Userpoints rules integration. ubercart_userpoints installs the necessary conditional actions. I followed the installation instructions, and when I purchased a product using the credit card sandbox, I was awarded points.

Here is the userpoints function you want, I think, from the API discussion in README:

userpoints_get_current_points($uid = NULL, $tid = NULL);
  Returns an integer of the sum of the user's point 
  If a tid is passed in that category's sum is returned otherwise
  the sites default category is used

So, I think your use case is handled. (Points are by dollar amount, but that would be very easy to fix.)

I'll repeat that I'd be willing to try my hand at a module for the multi-store concept with organic groups, but I haven't worked with UC, so ANY HELP on the hooks from a real UC developer would be appreciated. I need this now, so I don't want to wait for D7, or commerce (no shipping until 2.0!) unless that's faster.

Nothing new under the sun: Drupal 4.6.x.

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Cart on a group is definitely something that I think has value. Specifically when used with Drupal Commons. If you could add a cart to a Commons Group you've basically created a similar functionality to UC Marketplace, but with all of the benefits of Commons for community building around the store. It's the community ecosystem that builds customer base IMHO. If I may suggest, I think you should considering building this functionality with complete integration in Commons in mind. IMHO, I think Commons is a much better starting platform for multisite, but it doesn't have the module support; yet!

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+1

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I am trying to add a ubercart store as a content type to Organic Group. So was anyone able to do this successfully ?
If you have please provide the steps followed. I am using Acquia Commons ( Drupal 6 ) and Ubercart.
I was able to add Product as a Organic Group content type but not able to add Store to Organic Group.

How do we add Ubercart Store to Organic Group ?

I am also interested in what Stomper originally mentioned

Anyone figure this organic groups thing out? Using drupal 7

I am closing this issue, since it is for a Drupal version that now is not supported.
Please re-open it if the issue is also relevant for other project branches that require a supported Drupal version.