Hi Luke-

This question may not regard what you would consider as an "add on" but I wasn't sure the best place to post.

What we are trying to do is find a robust eCommerce "starter project" that we can use and add additional pages that give our customers the ability to look up products and pricing through the web services offered by one of our suppliers. When the customer makes a purchase decision and clicks on the "Add to Cart" button that product would then be sent to the shopping cart provided via the "starter project"

I assume that if inventory management is involved then we will probably have to add that product to the inventory first then conduct the transaction to sell it in the shopping cart.

We do not have a lot of resources for this project. I have one ASP.net developer available part time and need to complete the implementation within one to two months. Do you think that DotShoppingCart is a good choice for this project? Do you have any suggestions for us?

Any advice or suggestions are appreciated.

Mark

Technically you can call the web services to get pricing just fine. But why cannot you set the pricing first for your suppliers? Introducing the web services to your ecommerce system is to add possibility to get your site broken when web services are down. If you can explain more about the nature of your business, I might be able to give you more practical suggestions.

Luke-

Thanks for your reply and kind offer of assistance.

The supplier that we are using is huge. They have $32 million in inventory available to us in thousands of products and pricing fluctuates regularly. They also handle most of the fulfillment and ship most of the products directly to our customers. Their web services offerings are very robust including the ability to display our price as a percentage of MSRP when customers search using the pages that we build (maybe we just do the calculation on our page I am not sure). The challenge is that as I expressed earlier we need to be able to send the product and pricing info to the shopping cart. We may also need to add items to the inentory system in the eCommerce database and then sell them out of the database (it would be helpful to know if that would be necessary).

The supplier we are using is big enough that we really aren't concerned about availability of web services (I hope that we don't regret that choice later).

We also have a several types of products that we inventory and ship directly to customers so we really need the best of both worlds. We need a complete eComerce site like that which is typically provided by DotShoppingCart so we can build listings for the products that we warehouse and ship but we also need to tie in the web services of the other supplier. Ideally the customer would be able to purchases both of these types of products in the same shopping cart by simply looking up the item on the appropriate page and clicking on the "Add to Cart" button.

What do you think? Can we build seperate pages and interface those to the DotShoppingCart site?

Thanks.

Mark

I guess you want to build a DropShip Client in DotShoppingCart, right?

It's a software. I don't see how you cannot accomplish what you want. You still need some pre-integration of your supplier, such as getting the categories or product list into DotShoppingCart system. If you need help in the customization, feel free to post questions to the forums.