Just to demonstrate the complexities when developing a bespoke ecommerce solution:
Many thanks for your email. This looks like great stuff. If possible I’d like one more face to face meeting so that the other partner in the business, my brother, can meet you and see some of your work and aslo discuss the website. We won’t take up much of your time. Ideally if we could make it an afternoon appointment that would be great. 3.30pm onwards would be best if possible.
We moved the site to the root, meaning its accessible without the /newsite directory (sorry for techy speak) I gave the new links for the site and the admin site so sorry if thats confusing. We normally build new sites directory without a holding directory, you dont need to worry about payments etc as we havent got it indexed in the search engines yet and even if it was it takes a long time to rank competitively so thats not a problem. Regarding the progress I thought we were making progress with your questions and our answers and am currently awaiting your replies to the last lot email. Happy to meet and talk through these points also but probably a more efficient use of our time if we can get replies to the last email first.
Having re-reviewed our emails I understand your pain and can see that there is a lot of rough edges still. I have sent a list of 12 problems to the developers after reviewing the site for the last 2 hours. When do you want to meet up? Next Thursday day / evening is looking the best for me at the moment.
In the meantime if there are any main points that havent been discussed and you want looking at please tell us – also can you create a business paypal account, assume using the email address is still the same one to enable the payment process to be checked
1 Think Product should be the primary / initial / first field – Response We agree that this is a good idea. We will re-work the spreadsheet to make the product the first field.
2 There is only one price per product manufacturer (do you want the same price in all the fields? – Response The initial price point is merely there to populate the cell for the time being. We will endeavour to insert pricing & pack pricing but we feel that pricing will be a constantly moving feast depending on our competitors and market demand. In the subsequent fields “2 products price” & “2+ products price” there are formulas to calculate the discount for these multiple purchases. At present this discount is set at 10% for 2 products and then another 10% but as with product / pack pricing this could change
3 Am I correct in thinking you dont want the Inventory and Free item fields / functionality initially – Response Regarding the inventory field we have concluded that this should be populated but not with a qty just yet. Initially we will indicate either “In stock” or “Awaiting stock” or, for the more obscure/dated cartridges, “Available upon request” Regarding the free item field-no functionality required at present
Regarding the ‘pack’ items, not totally sure if I understand this yet – it looks like each product has a pack associated with it, that pack doesn’t have its own inventory but has its own images / price. Response Each single product is associated with a pack. The idea behind this is basically that when a customer searches for a single product, or manufacturer, they will also see the additional products associated with the manufacturer. This will give us the opportunity to up-sell and increase the consumer basket spend. As with the single item inventory field we will populate the pack inventory field with “In stock” or “Awaiting stock” or, for the more obscure/dated cartridges, “Available upon request”
If you required automatic reduction in the inventory of the child items upon sale of a set item, we will have to develop a separate parent-child relationship feature altogether. That will involve additional time / effort / cost/
Its possible that we can develop an interface in the Admin panel for defining this parent-child relationship by selecting set products and their respective ingredient products. But it is not clear to us how can that relationship be automatically established through the Excel import itself. While importing the records, exactly how will the system know which ingredient items belong to a particular set item? I have said previously that it would make sense to have the pack products as an individual product that has fields within it that contains ‘child’ products but not sure this is the way you want to go
Observations so far are as follows.
Front end
1) All prices are in USD $
2) Search bar is active for product only. Needs to recognise manufacturers as well.
3) When searching by product its displayed multiple times indicating compatibility. There is no need to display the cartridge for every compatible product
4) Search by manufacturer
- Cartridges are displayed 2 at a time not all together
- No parent item (cartridge set) is displayed.
5) Fields for item type and ink fill are only displayed when “drilling down” in to the product
6) Checkout. Priority should be given to “checkout as guest”.
Back end
1) Under manage product, manage manufacture, the products appear numerous times. This means that any alterations that need to be made to products e.g. pricing, will need to made several times rather than once. This will be extremely time consuming and not ideal. I’m sure we’ll find more as we look further in to the site.
Spreadsheet item import
While waiting to your response the client has produced an example spreadsheet with some queries
As per your suggestion we have redeveloped the spreadsheet using the column heading you have recommended. For the time being we have only used Lexmark as an example for you to show your web developers. The sheet has been saved as a CSV file but this has created a few problems as follows:
A) Saving as a CSV will only allow individual worksheets to be saved, not entire workbooks.
B) When saving as a CSV file the hyperlinks to images are removed because they are not compatible with CSV files.
We are not too worried about point A but can you confirm that you will display the cartridge images on our website?.
Also, in excel 2010 it is not possible to copy the information from multiple cells and paste in to 1 cell, e.g. copying all printer info and pasting in to 1 cell. Do you know of a solution for this?.
I believe that this is not a good answer – you can update individual columns within the database and if you are saying all ‘cartridge numbers’ must have the symbol – replaced with the symbol , then I am sure you have some that can update the cartridge column in 10 minutes, you could also replace these in excel and re-import them, if you are saying that all ‘set’ cartridges should have the the symbol – replaced with the symbol , then this is an easy thing to do
We have informed you earlier at several of our emails that we had sent you. We mentioned that the system needs to separate the string values with respect to a particular symbol (as you have cartridge names that include the “-“symbol). Thus, we suggested inserting the “,” symbol in order to separate the cartridges from the set.
“With respect to your request as mentioned at the attached document for replacing the ‘-‘ symbol with ‘,’ symbol, it would not be possible to execute a query in order to replace the symbol at the database since this would replace all the ‘-’ symbol that may reside at the product name as well. This being the only solution for your additional requirement, the symbol needs to be changed manually. Also, find attached the document file with our comments as mentioned therein.
With regards to your requirement, we tried to explain that this is not a 10 mins job that can be executed via a script or a code. If we have to change the symbol from the strings, then we have to do it manually that the client will be doing.
Thus, it would consume the might be some more time than the client in order to change the symbol if we do it manually from the csv file. Thus, request you to change the symbols in order to separate the set pack.
The system has been tailor made to accept the “,” symbol for separation of the cartridge names in order to maintain system stability. Otherwise, the system will not work on the logic. Thus, it is important to change the separator symbol for each cartridge in the set from “-” to “,”.
Also, regarding the orders mails, the cartridge numbers are displayed as well. Please refer to the attached screenshot in order for your clarification.
All what we need is that the separator for each cartridge under the set pack should be denoted by “,” symbol and not the space. Might be when you are updating the “,” symbol at the csv, it might confirm to keep the same file format. You need to confirm that while saving the csv after implementing the symbol modification.
We can use either “/” or “|” as the separator. Please refer to the attached CSV samples as well as to the attached screenshot. The first CSV is the original canon.csv unaltered. There you will notice that the item name as well as the separator contains “-“. In the second CSV, we have manually replaced the separator “-” with “/”.
This change cannot be done using automatic Find / Replace in Excel or MySQL since the same record contains multiple instances of “-” used as a standard character as well as a separator. The find / replace command will not be able to distinguish between the two and will globally replace all “-” with “/”. Thus, manual replacement is needed.
For now, we may update the CSVs ourselves and upload them afresh. However, for all future CSV uploads, the client will first need to change the separator from “-” to “/” for all set items. We will continue with the update if you confirm that this manual change is CSV is acceptable to the client. In that case you can send us all the latest CSVs so that we can edit and upload them.
Also, since the site functionalities has already been implemented and since we repeatedly worked on several feedback. Also since the site is up and running at your live site for a certain period of time, we request you to kindly clear our balance amount that was due for the project. Since the website functionalities have already been implemented and since we repeatedly worked on several additional updates from your feedback. Also since the site is up and running at your live site for a certain period of time, we request you to kindly clear our balance amount that was due for the project.
Thanks for your quick reply. We have completed the following points:
- Order checkout and payment process (Using Paypal Getway) via cart.
- View “Order Details” with payment status link that will be reflected on the user’s profile section as well as admin section after transaction.
- Wish list section is now functional in the user’s profile page. Once user can add a product in his/her wish list then the product details are shown in his/her wish list section.
Please check the update functionalities and give your feedback.
All the required functional parts depending on our project specification is completed. To make the payment mode “Test mode” to “Live Mode”, we are requesting to provide us the live paypal id.
We have tested the website functionality as well as the logos on different browsers (IE7, IE8, Google Chrome, Firefox) under different environment. However, could not find any discrepancy as reported. We found the images to be appearing at proper places.
Request you to kindly provide us with complete details of the browser (Name of the Browser, Version of Browser) in which you are testing.
Further more, request for your kind feedback regarding the updates that we implemented previously.
