Hi everyone, I'm looking for an ecommerce solution that helps a customer configure their order, similar to Dell's shopping cart. We sell hardware along with a subscription base and offer support options. What i'm looking to do is have a cart where a customer can go "I want x amount of hardware" and then the cart will recommend the appropriate monthly subscription which they can go higher or lower (depending on what's required) or no monthly subscription at all. Then before checkout they can also add on support incident packages or bundles. When they select hardware, they have a choice of upgrading all their hardware to the next best thing or just parts of their order (for example they order 10 items and 3 are top of the line premium items and the other 7 are a mix of the cheapest and mid-tier items). I'd then like the customer info registered into a database which can be exported into TigerPaw and potentially mailchimp or other marketing tool. Users will then be able to checkout and pay and the monthly subscription then begins (we can customize the billing cycle) and customers can login to their account and upgrade (downgrade)/add-on hardware as they wish in the future. Does anything similar like this exist or would I have to custom build it? if i were to custom build it is there any existing carts out there that i can customize to do this?
I doubt such solution exists exactly as you describe. Most likely, you will need to custom build it. If you go with hosted ecommerce solution, you will be limited with flexibility. You can check open source (free) solutions such as Abantecart, Magento or commercial solution CS cart. You can tune these solutions, but most likely you will need developer. MAgento and CS-cart is harder to modify
You can do this with magento. You can even let folks build computers a part at a time. Its not that vexing. It is a bit of work though. hope that helps, Nigel
Nigel: What version of magento can do this? GO? Enterprise? I've never quite used magento before. Do you know of where i can go on how to set this up? Also i'm more so looking for a solution that I can host myself. I prefer having control over it and not paying someone else a monthly fee.
I typically make my clients buy some stuff to get to an enterprise level solution but I use the free iteration of it. http://magento.com/ some thoughts on "kitting" or letting folks build things on the fly... http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/comments/video-bundle-kitting-in-magento-11/ I would have to assume that stuff has changed a bit since then but you will get the general idea on that part. I typically suggest folks buy somethings like http://ecommerce.aheadworks.com/magento-extensions/points-and-rewards.html and http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/who-bought-this-also-bought-by-aheadworks.html At which point you are pretty close to an enterprise level solution. Themes on themeforest are pretty nice depending on what you have to do and pretty cheap. Magento is a tad resource intensive so it helps to have a VPS you can tune yourself. My host is only about 60 bucks for a screaming fast machine. That is pretty cheap at the end of the day. The same thing cost me 170 when I was with hostgator. You can certainly host other things on the machine as well. You just need some overhead in a few places you wont get with shared hosting. Hope that helps a bit. I am happy to answer questions. Nigel
Enterprise lets you host it yourself? What's that run someone anyway? It seems open cart can do what i want with a cheap extension, it looks a bit ugly, im sure it can be cleaned up a bit more and have a nicer look. http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=extension/extension/info&extension_id=16522&filter_search=configurator It may be worth it to use opencart, get this modification and hire a developer to do the other things i want. Can even i guess get the customer info to port into tigerpaw or use tigerpaw to take care of the backend instead.
They both let you host it yourself. That is why I suggested the free one. You are complicating things as well. I would still go with magento as well. Its much more advanced. Most of what you need to do product wise can be done out of the box. Magento runs everything in terms of the backend etc. as well. Nigel
I think that, by the sound of it, you will definitely want to get together with a developer if you wind up going with Magento.