I am wanting to use another vendor but there are a lot of conficts involved in doing so. The conficts include:
Product code - Some are the same, some are different for the same product
Price - One costs more than the other for same product (I don’t want to have to sort through 20,000 products on a regular basis to pick and choose)
Shipping - Different from one vendor to the other
Free shipping - Different from one vendor to the other
There are probably more that I haven’t thought of but I was wanting to find out if anyone else has gone through this and what is the best way of handling it. Both vendors provide updated csv files on a daily basis and I am trying to figure out the best/easiest way to go about setting it all up and being able to update inventory.
I just wanted to pick brains and get some ideas. I am thinking that I should set up another cart on a subdomain.?
Maybe I should have used the term Suppliers instead of Vendors but it doesn’t look like I will be getting any ideas anyway.?
[quote name=‘Tool Outfitters’]Maybe I should have used the term Suppliers instead of Vendors but it doesn’t look like I will be getting any ideas anyway.?[/QUOTE]
If I am not wrong, cs-cart team has promised that Shopping Mall feature will be included in cs-cart 2.0 final release!!!
Still needing some advice on this one.
I think I have come to a conclusion that I will need to have 2 seperate carts because of both suppliers having some of the same products/product code and also the fact that there are different “minimum amounts to buy” and “free shipping after a certain amount” for each (can’t have a customer ordering products from each supplier and still give free shipping).
So the question is, should I set up a subdomain with another install (basically the same look as main store but with a name like “Tool Outfitters 2”) or is this frowned upon by the internet? I wonder if there would be any conficts between the 2?
I’m in the early stages of a similar project (multiple drop shippers in the same store) and I’m sure I’ll run across different products that share the same SKU. My plan is to pre-pend the SKUs with a Supplier identifier (ex. products from vendor A: “123” becomes “A123”) before I import the products into CS-Cart. I’ll have to communicate this change to my Suppliers so they’re not confused once I start passing them orders.
Regarding your shipping setup: The Promotions tool is very sophisticated, but there is no way to specify Suppliers in the conditional logic. I’m guessing this would be a relatively minor addition for the CS-Cart team. It’s definitely worth asking them for a quote.
Glen
Thanks for the reply Glen. Yeah, I was thinking of changing the Product code to reflect the supplier but there are other concerns.
If a customer wants to purchase items from different suppliers then the shipping charges are going to be, in some cases, double what you are charging the customer (I’m using realtime data to calculate shipping)
Also, say your suppliers have free shipping over $500 yet the customer wants $250 worth of products from one supplier and $250 worth of products from the other. Then what do you do?
One of the reasons we selected CS-Cart 2 for our project was it’s ability to calculate real-time shipping per Supplier. If a customer selects items from multiple Suppliers, they can select the shipping method for each group of Supplier items during checkout. Granted, this presents the customer with unexpected shipping costs so we’ll probably offer a “FREE Super Saver Shipping” option (like Amazon.com) and build the cost for that into the margin or use a Promotion rule (free shipping for orders over $X). If the customer needs their items quicker, they can pay for expedited shipping.