Private eCommerce Site?

[theboynorris]

Hi All,

I've been asked to help design an eCommerce site for a friend of mine. We're playing around with Prestashop at the moment and finding it very very good.

Basically he imports a product and wants to sell direct to customers on one site, and to people in the trade on another.

What are his (our) options with regard making a site (Prestahop or otherwise), and requiring people to login before they can see products or prices (so as customers can't view trade prices).

Thanks for any advice you can give me

Brian

 

[tomed]

Hi All,

I've been asked to help design an eCommerce site for a friend of mine. We're playing around with Prestashop at the moment and finding it very very good.

Basically he imports a product and wants to sell direct to customers on one site, and to people in the trade on another.

What are his (our) options with regard making a site (Prestahop or otherwise), and requiring people to login before they can see products or prices (so as customers can't view trade prices).

Thanks for any advice you can give me

Brian

Why are you requiring someone to log in to see the products?

ZenCart and osCommerce can both me modified to work like this - but not sure about Prestashop.

 

[theboynorris]

Why are you requiring someone to log in to see the products?

ZenCart and osCommerce can both me modified to work like this - but not sure about Prestashop.

As I said in my post so consumers can't view the prices he sells to trade users at. It wouldn't be good business for them to see the extra markup he's making selling direct to the consumer as opposed selling on to a shop etc.

I've read alot on prestashop and it doesn't seem to have this feature at all. Prestashop and Magento are miles ahead of ZenCart and osCommerce when it comes to everything else, but they don't have the large amount of add ons yet. Magento offers what I'm looking for in the Enterprise Edition, but thats ~$8000 per year, as opposed to free

What other options do I have regarding securing the site, even if the eCommerce software doesn't support it? Can i lock down an entire domain and have 200+ different usernames and passwords?

Thanks again for any help.

 

[mneylon]

A lot of the trade only vendors use this kind of setup...

I'm not sure what the sanest way of doing it is, but you can password protect the entire thing if you want .. you could probably use the user account details in the ecommerce backend to handle the authentication ..

 

[theboynorris]

A lot of the trade only vendors use this kind of setup...

I'm not sure what the sanest way of doing it is, but you can password protect the entire thing if you want .. you could probably use the user account details in the ecommerce backend to handle the authentication ..

Thanks for that blacknight

I was surprised there wasn't an option in the backend to enable such a setup, I thought it would be a common request.

I'll have to look into it further I suppose, I'm not too comfortable with advanced web programming, so a quick and easy solution with suit me

 

[tomed]

Yep - I know plenty of trade only places would do this, but this isn't a trade only site. It's for both business and consumers. So my point was, why block it off with a login first.

ZenCart or osCommerce can do this with a bit of modding. There are a few different ways of approaching it though. So it needs plenty of thought as to which way suits you best.

We just did it on a site recently... www.wildcat.ie

 

[dropbop]

Zen cart is your best option. If you are good at designing at all you should be able to make zen look somewhat like a prestashop site on the front end.

I have set up a few wholesale suppliers using zen and their customers have to be autorized to see priceing and purchase. It done very quickly and simply in the back end. Also zen has so many add-ons/contributions that it should have anything you need.

I am in the middle of doing a site using presta simply for the smooth look of the front end but ZenCart is by far the best (to me anyway!)

As for using the site for both B2C & B2B you can set different pricing structures for each. ie: you can show the retail price for your retail customers and when a trade customer registers you can set a discount level for them to purchase at.

Not sure if im making any sense here. But I have a lot of experience with ZenCart so if you need any info in particular just lety me know and I will do my best to help you out.


EDIT: Another option is (and many do this) is to have 2 sites on the one domain. (well 3 actually)

You can have the main site ie: www.yoursite.ie with links to the other 2 sites - retail.yoursite.ie & wholesale.yoursite.ie

So, after setting them up your retail customers can go straight to the retail site and your trade customers can go to the trade site where prices will only be shown after they register and are aproved as a trade customer by the Admin (site owner).