ADVANCED shopping cart advice?

[bluelightning2k]

Hello.

I'm quite a tech savy person who runs a business which is successful to a degree as a saturday job and unique in many, many ways.

I've got some unusual requirements that I'm going to list here, and I'm basically looking for advice on which would be the best shopping cart solutions to go for -- if such things do actually exist, or if I should have something custom made, and if so where to go, and what to customise from, or to start from scratch, etc.


I actually scripted what I currently have myself 100% in PHP, but it's time to upgrade and I just don't have the time or motivation to upgrade it again.


The first problem is the products I sell. I buy and sell virtual currency and items that exist only in the virtual worlds of games such as World of Warcraft, etc. (I don't sell in that particular game, but it's a convenient example.) This is difficult because there is no delivery address, but the product has a very real value. So fraud's a real problem -- people can scam stuff off people like us and sell it on, and we not only lose the sale, but we lose what we paid for the product. It's not like e-book or web hosting companies where it matters less.

I'd go so far as to say we're the industry that faces most fraud.



On this basis, the shopping cart needs to support automatic fraud verfication services such as MaxMind's auto-telephone verification thing.
- That's big problem number one.

Users need to open a quick account to purchase, as this provides us with leads and, again, increases security. I understand most shopping carts allow this, so that's a not-so-big problem number two.


Now here's the real biggie: I run my business like a local shopkeeper would, on a very personal level. I know the customers and offer frequent special packages and special discounts. Ideally I'd be able to offer the following two features:
1) Links sent via. MSN, email etc, to special products/prices NOT available on the main website. Eg. a returning customer might be offered a special package at a discount, and that link would take him too it. (It would be REALLY cool if I could include a personalised explanation note on the buy page when the customer clicks this link.)

2) Site-wide discounts: I'd love to be able to -- for example -- set a personal note on a customer's account so when they log in or try to make a purchase it says "Hey man, welcome back -- as a frequent buyer I've gone ahead and set an automatic 10% discount on your account whenever you buy gold. Enjoy!" -- for example.
- The customer would hopefully see this note every time they log into their account, and the discount would be automatically applied when they try to buy products with a certain flag or keyword or something. Would be cool to be able to apply this to groups, or maybe say something like a 10% discount for a certain customer on a certain product.



There's some more, really off the wall stuff I'd love to do which is simply 100% guaranteed to need doing custom... For instance I'd very, very much like to set something up so that a customer gets x free product absolutely free if they register an account on my site, including validating a mobile phone number, and they get two friends to do the same.
- This kinda crazy stuff.


Another difficult one: As well as buying, I sell stuff. I'd love to have some kind of system where people can enter what they're selling in a 'Sell' section of their account, and optionally offer a price they're looking for, and I could return with counter-offers and we could haggle back and forth through this system. Advice is appreciated here, but it is less important than the other stuff.

 

[awebapart.com]

To have a chance of combating fraud in this area you really have to move away from an instant product download scenario, use deferred payments, manually check anything that looks suspicious first before sending out valuable goods (one-off electronic downloads), and use a payment provider that provides extra fraud protection in this area, e.g. Protx. This is not a problem limited to virtual world products, it is problem for any shop owner sending out valuable goods (the more valuable the goods, the greater the risk).

It looks like you really need to go the custom route for your website, but you still might be able to make use of an open source system as a base for your website. Have a look at osCommerce and the numerous contributions that have been created for it (www.oscommerce.com/community/contributions), but remember that osCommerce should only be used as a base for developing your site, most useful contributions are not end-user install programs but are instructions and code samples showing developers how to make changes to the osCommerce code base, and as such serious development skills will be required.

As for your last requirement, if you want your website visitors to be able to upload and sell their items, then you are talking about a C2C (consumer to consumer) e-commerce system rather than the normal B2C (business to consumer) e-commerce system, and this a whole new ball game in terms of complexity. This complexity can be avoided if the shop owner is responsible for setting up and selling visitor's items, thus turning it back into a normal B2C system.

 

[MichaelG]

Sounds like a really interesting project and a bespoke solution.

01: Building the shopping cart itself is pretty standard stuff
02: Integrating MaxMind should not be a problem or you can also use standard SMS verification (not that secure - because of pre-paid phones). You can manually authorise all purchases before download.
03: Personalisation is also standard stuff (including personalised discounts)

Sell section

This is pretty easy to do.

Account holders just need to submit a product name, product description, quantity and price. Replies (haggling) will than be recorded under each parent item. Once an agreement has been reached, the account holder uploads the file(s) - you approve and add agreed sum to their account as credit or loyalty point or pay them cash (this can be done maybe via paypal)

The challenge here is making sure you produce a very good requirements document. If you are developer, then this is where RAD can help - lots of prototyping - will help you a great deal.

Building something bespoke I think will be the quicker route for you - waste less time on trying to modify existing software to suit your needs.

Is there a market for a system like this - i.e. could you sell a system like this to someone else. If the answer is yes, you might consider getting as many people as possible to contribute some cash toward the development of the core application in return for the rights to use the finished application.

 

[davidduk]

This requires a custom made script that can be created either from scratch or with an existing system. You will need to be quotes from reptuable web design companies.

 

[Duncan_W]

Some interesting requirements there. I would also recommend going the OsCommerce route. If you are OK at php programming that this would be a good starting point on which you could build.

I would actually recommend going for one of the "developed" OsCommerce products (We use CRE Loaded www.creloaded.com) as this will have much of the functionality you are looking for built in out of the box.

 

[inetbiz]

CRE Loaded or Magento community versions. I think in CRE you have to pay for the File Distribution Management modules. It already had API calls to maximind, deny proxies, etc. I too would set default status to pending. Paypal or Credit Card orders fulfilled within 24 hours. This would give the real credit card holder time enough to notice a fraudulent charge. Don't rely on the telephone and email. Have your merchant provider look up the first six digit BIN code and have them contact the card holder if you really suspect it may be a fraud charge.

Your merchant provider would have many techniques to combat fraud charges. IMHO