Barney, a good well-reasoned reply.
Maybe we should have looked at Miva Merchant rather than ShopSite.
However, the ISP our company most normally works with is a ShopSite
reseller and it has the functions to do what we need for presentation of
information and sales, if not for order management. Of course, there
are several additional options that would make it easier for us to
install/maintain the solution that our customer needs; e.g.
I am definitely interested in knowing more about your "utility program".
Depending on price and availability, it could help.
My own experience was almost entirely in the installation of Mercantec's
Softcart or the Open Source WebStore from Selena Sol (extropia.com).
Barney Stone wrote:
Wes -
Obviously, our Order Manager is not the perfect solution for all users.
I
keep "plugging" it here because most ShopSite users only come to this
forum
when they have a problem they need solved, and they have no other way of
finding out about our ShopSite products. (If you can think of an
economical
way of advertising our products to 30,000 ShopSite merchants whose
products
vary from Harley Davidson parts to artistic switch-plate covers, I'd
sure
like to here it.) True, like all of us I'm in it for the money, but I
also
feel that as the ONLY other company providing products like ours to
ShopSite
merchants, I am also providing a valuable service, so I hope you will
excuse
the commercial messages.
Now, to your problems:
We will have a utility program available in a few weeks that will
convert
ShopSite orders into the proper format for importing into MOM. Like most
of
our programs, it will be open-source, written in Microsoft Access and
VBA
and customizable. The price has not been set yet. You might find it
useful.
Let me know if you are interested.
Making tracking and status info available to your users on-line is a
tougher
challenge. Most solutions, whether off-the-shelf or custom written, are
likely to be out of the price range of most ShopSite merchants. For now,
we
handle those issues with email-merge templates that can include order
status
and shipment tracking fields.
Yes, having more control of downloads and direct access to the databases
would be nice, but most ShopSite users don't have the training, time or
inclination to deal with such things. If you really need that kind of
access, you might want to switch to Miva Merchant, which is an open
system,
and all of the hassles and problems that that entails.
- Barney Stone, President
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
215-641-1837
www.ECommerceUtilities.com"Wes Rolley" <wrolley@refpub.com> wrote in message
news:3CECF7BD.2050301@refpub.com...
Barney, you seem to grab every opportunity to plug Order Manager on this
forum. However, it does not seem to be the solution to all problems.
Our customer has an existing business with existing processes for order
management, marketing, inventory management, etc. supporting catalog
"snail mail" and 1-800 telephone sales. They are, in fact, using Mail
Order Manager (MOM).
This gives us 2 problems. The first is to build the tranform for
getting Shopsite Orders into MOM Import Order format. This is
technically not difficult and most of the time is spent on defining what
the "comments" field is used for, which differs between the 2 systems
and resolving which name field should be transferred name, F-Name,
O-Name, pay2, based on how MOM handles Credit card info with name split
into Last Name, First Name (includes MI in the First Name).
The second problems is to synchronize information the other way so that
we can provide online feedback on order status, e.g. indication of
whether or not an order has shipped and UPS or FEDEX tracking number.
Therefore, I need to have an online DB of order info that is accessible
to a "registered customer."
The tasks of extracting order information, building a new, simplified
order DB, and controlling the download of orders for Import into MOM
would be significantly less if there were an API to access the order DB,
or at the minimum, a template that would allow me to control the format
of the DB Download content or the data that is passed in the Order API.
The current list of data is much more than I require for import to the
customer's existing systems.
Wes
Barney Stone wrote:
Jon -
You might be able to save yourself a lot of time and expense if you
check
out the Stone Edge Order Manager for ShopSite at:
http://stoneedge.com/OrderManager.htm- Barney Stone, President
Stone Edge Technologies, Inc.
215-641-1837
www.ShopSiteUtilities.com"J Graham" <jkgraham@homeworkout.com> wrote in message
news:acggl0$ccs$1@support.shopsite.com...
Hi,
I'm working on a couple of custom import/export programs to load our
Shopsite orders, associates and products data into Quickbooks and UPS
Worldship. I've looked at the tab delimited format of the files you
can
download from the Utilities menu of Shopsite and found that these are
fairly
limited (no weight in the orders download among other things).
Can I get the format of the .db files that are on the server (in the
/data)
directory?
Thanks,
-Jon
jkgraham@homeworkout.com