Forum OpenACS Q&A: Ecommerce experience

Posted by Ben Chan on 08/27/04 12:04 AM

What are other companies experience with the ecommerce package for OpenACS? Does anyone know which companies are using it currently?

Our company is looking into the ecommerce package for OpenACS to manage software, hardware, license keys, etc. purchases. The package itself looks like it's built to handle all of the operations.

Things like having retrieveable and printable receipts, shipping labels, and other customizing features would be nice, but I'm sure that could be easily made by creating a page and doing a few database queries.

Thanks for any help!

2: Re: Ecommerce experience (response to 1)

Posted by Janine Ohmer on 08/27/04 05:00 AM

People seem to have a love-it-or-hate-it relationship with the e-commerce module. We (furfly) have used it on several sites and it has been fine for what we needed to do. Others have fought with it every step of the way and have declared their, err, distaste for the experience. I think it depends greatly on how close it is "out of the box" to what you want to do. It's not very flexible, so if you need to make more than superficial changes you'll be getting your hands dirty in the code, and how fulfilling or frustrating that turns out to be depends on what you're trying to do.

I'm not sure if that shed much light on the subject, but that's my $0.02. :)

Good luck!

3: Re: Ecommerce experience (response to 1)

Posted by James Thornton on 08/27/04 05:45 AM

I have been working on something that I have dubbed EC2. It's an ecommerce package for OpenACS 5.x, but it's not a application that you can use out-of-the-box. It's more of a service than an application. It's made up of a data model, stored procedures, and a Tcl API, but it has been designed so that you can build custom ecommerce applications that hook into it.

For example, there is a table ec2_product that stores all the generic product attributes required for ecommerce. To use it, a developer would create object types that are subtypes of the ec2_product type. The developer would create the front-end application pages, and they would get all of the backend stuff for free. I am going to try to find time to develop a generic ecommerce package that hooks into EC2 and emulates the features of the current ecommerce package as an example for how to use it.

EC2 is not finished, and what I have now has been designed for Postgres (no Oracle stuff yet). I am working on a site that will use it, I'm releasing the site in a few weeks (I hope), and I'm planning on releasing a preliminary version of EC2 then.

4: Re: Ecommerce experience (response to 1)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 08/27/04 07:32 AM

James, that's great news. I'm planning on helping upgrade ec to a series of packages (with upgrade paths =) and use more integrated aspecs of the acs kernel, such as ad_form. So look forward to contributing bits to your work.

Ben, the ec code is mainly early openacs, no ad_form, no use of the CR etc.. but there's lots of jewels in there. Bart has just added an interface to google's froogle service. And as you can see from James and searching these forums, there is plenty of interest in adding new work to it. I am soon to add a 1 page fulfillment form (as soon as I get rid of a bug in it ..and it doesn't use ad_form either).

I help operate a site running openacs 4.6.3 with ecommerce (kingsolar.net), and will update to 5.x once:

A. we (my company) put ec through some local requirements tests, and

B. there is a consensus that aolserver4.x with nsopenssl3 is production ready[1]

1. https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=198157

cheers,

Torben

5: Re: Ecommerce experience (response to 1)

Posted by Ben Chan on 08/27/04 04:11 PM

Thanks for the great input!

EC2 sounds like an interesting project.

We're just hesitant to invest money and get tied down with fees that we might not have to go through at all. Has there been any trouble in getting information for accounting purposes from ecommerce?

6: Re: Ecommerce experience (response to 1)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 08/28/04 08:35 PM

Ben,

The short answer is that the data is available through the db interface and psql.

Are there existing pages that return the accounting information as you want it? That depends on the accounting/bookkeeping requirements. It's best to answer this question by trying it out --before making commitments.