Shopping cart with no public front end?

I am searching for a eCommerce cart for a very specific purpose and wondering if anyone has tried to do the same. My company sells software licenses which renew on a yearly basis. We've tried an online store before, but had too many fraudulent orders so we had to shut it down. Now we'd like to have a cart just for customers who are renewing - new customers would still have to call us to buy.

Ideally, we'd like to be able to send the customer an email saying that their license is about to expire - in the email there would be a link to the shopping cart, maybe even to their specific product if possible. However, we do NOT want just anyone to be able to access our store, only existing customers that we send the link to. Whether this means our store is password protected or just not visible to the public, either way. We're just trying to keep it from being pried into by fraudsters.

Has anyone tried any cart for a similar purpose? Anyone have any suggestions?

 

That is called catalog mode. I have done this with opencart and this http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=10762

hope that helps,
Nigel

 

You could send a link to existing clients that goes to a hidden web page. If you're afraid the hidden page would get shared (or leaked out), you could append the URL with something like hiddenpage.aspx?id=[some unique #] and then have the web server side evaluate the id to see if already used and valid.

 

I think I completely missed the point here lol... You can always password protect a folder with apache if need be as well.

Nigel

 

I think there should be quite a lot of carts which can suit you.

In the Viart shop I'm using there is special option for this available:
User Registration: ( ) Customer can buy products without registration
( o ) All customers must have an account before they can order products

So if user doesn't has an account or it wasn't approved he will not be able to purchase any product on your site.
It's also has recurring orders functionality so your customer orders could be created automatically - yearly, monthly, ...

 

You can also do this with Woocommerce and their software add on plugin.

Good luck!
Elliott

 

Yes, you can do this with Magento ecommerce platform. You can also customized your current shopping website or migrate with the one who will give you the such portability.

 

http://sourceforge.net/projects/opensourcepos/

you can see demo here http://www.softaculous.com/demos/Open_Source_Point_of_Sale

 

Just create a sales page for your new customers to get in touch with you and then in a subdirectory have a client area which offers renewals , most software would do this including things such as WHMCS which is mainly for hosting however can be modified to act as a membership site.

You can do this with literally any cart however, if you need help just shoot me a message and we can go through some options to suit your business model.

 

It is a fairly common feature to have products or your entire store password protected for a wholesale website or situation similar to your own. Most shopping carts support this feature. I've accomplished this for a client in Bigcommerce.

 

VPASP Shopping Cart allows you to have a login only store, you can also set different levels of access per user.

VPASP also contains a powerful Fraud Alert feature which checks several pieces of information including distance from IP address to Billing Address, IP Location, Email provider and use of proxy to determine whether or not an order may be fraudulent.

You can then set the system allow low risk orders to go through and follow medium to high risk orders up on the telephone.

Using this fraud alert system would allow you to open your store to new customers once again.

Gareth