Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: New & looking for shopping cart

4: Re: New & looking for shopping cart (response to 3)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 04/17/12 11:15 PM

You might want to look more deeply at the ecommerce package, depending on how certain you are at expanding.

dekkasupply.com uses ecommerce package, but we've switched off the payment-gateway aspects to use the free services by paypal, since their rates are cheaper than the ones we've been quoted by the payment-gateways! Generally, payment-gateways are supposed to have more competitive rates.. Anyway..we're working on a gateway to interface with Paypal Pro gateway, but finishing it is low priority at the moment. Other features are taking precedence.

The paypal procs are coded to use the existing ecommerce data, so we can toggle back and forth between services on the fly, when payment-gateway services are setup.

With the ecommerce package, you need to buy an SSL certificate, and pay monthly fees for a payment-gateway service which usually also quote the merchant-gateway pricing.

For few items or low volume, the overhead is not practical compared to services provided by paypal, google and other vendors promoting their cart services for free use.

ecommerce has lots of import facilities, so you can always choose something simple, and then upgrade later when you decide to go with OpenACS ecommerce package.

cheers,

Torben

5: Re: New & looking for shopping cart (response to 4)

Posted by Jim Lynch on 04/18/12 05:26 PM

Torben,

So the ecommerce package in cvs is actually the eg2 thing that you built, or the old original ecommerce that may not even be ported to postgres, and uses hardwired formulas for say the shipping cost calculation?

What would it take to get the eg2 one working?

-Jim

6: Re: New & looking for shopping cart (response to 5)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 04/18/12 06:59 PM

Hi Jim,

The ecommerce package is not the ec2 project, but ecommerce does benefit from some of the features developed for ec2, including importing product data from other websites (as a means of keeping pricing current) and flexible procs that help with importing, maintaining and displaying product data.

Ecommerce works with postgresql.

The hardwired shipping costs have been moved to a single proc to maximize flexibility in how shipping is calculated. There's also a shipping-gateway package for interfacing with a shipper's API; I haven't used it, so am not sure how current it is.

The underlying libraries of procedures and data models that make ec2 are almost complete. With a few years of experience with double entry bookkeeping (including audits) and building finance models for energy production projects, I believe I now have the experience to finish building ec2.

The hurdle at this point is dedicating revenue building time to complete ec2. To offset, I'm building a couple of web apps which also build on and add to the ec2 library. The process has been slow paced, but the goal is in sight.

cheers,

Torben

10: Re: New & looking for shopping cart (response to 6)

Posted by Jim Lynch on 04/18/12 08:16 PM

Torben,

All good to know...

As there are docs to show how to install oracle or postgres, aolserver and acs/openacs, does there exist similar documentation for setting up the cvs ecommerce and/or the ec2?

At minimum, does the exsiting documentation show how to get the whole thing installed? Again, either the openacs cvs version or ec2, including where to get the packages, and eventually both.

-Jim

11: Re: New & looking for shopping cart (response to 10)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 04/18/12 08:28 PM

Yep. Install ecommerce on your local installation of OpenACS and surf to ecommerce/doc Some of the documentation may not be clear, or references no longer available. You can contact me directly with issues that might be best handled outside of forums.

cheers,

12: Re: New & looking for shopping cart (response to 11)

Posted by Jim Lynch on 04/19/12 11:30 PM

Torben,

Could I ask a small favor... could I get you to install a test instance of (say) openacss-5.5 with pg-8.3 and then try installing the ecommerce package from cvs?

I'm doing the same on a copy of a (5.5. 8.3) instance I've been running over the years.

Reasons I ask are, it will be nice to have that same style of "do this, then do that, then build this" style of installation docs that acs enjoyed; and for the specific case of ecommerce I'm running into a number of issues that may or may not be solvable by someone who might potentially adopt openacs if it enjoyed a killer app as it did when dotlrn aas still alive.

Most likely we'll compare notes when we can get ecommerce installed, to the point the APM is satisfied insofar as dependent packages are concerned, and an instance of ecommerce can be mounted.. If needed before that, let's contact each other on this thread.

-Jim

13: Re: New & looking for shopping cart (response to 12)

Posted by Torben Brosten on 04/20/12 12:16 AM

Sure. ecommerce tends to be very customized with merchants choosing a unique blend. but I'm glad to help. I've openacs 5.7 installed from tar using pg 8.3 and ecommerce 5.18. It would probably best to start a new thread when you're ready.
cheers!

14: Re: New & looking for shopping cart (response to 13)

Posted by Jim Lynch on 04/20/12 04:44 AM

I did get it installed...

If you look at ecommerce.info, you'll see a list of what it needs, all but one of which I had to get from cvs; no one maintaining them and keeping them working with latest n greatest I suppose.

In two or three cases, the depended-upon package required things like a later kernel, but I just forced the install, seemed to work fine, data model loaded and everything.

Then installing ecommerce was easy, data model loaded without error, and after restarting I could browse around a little.

I'll be doing more as time goes on, but it seems to work fine so far; I at least get no errors on the pages I visited.

So far so good...

-Jim