This update will address the product to content relationship issue. At this point we are discussing several different approaches to the problem and I will be writing an RFC to before tearing into anything at great length.
This version should provide for:
The ability to add a product through content so that a content editor "can" have a single point of editing. The product will still show up in the Merchello Catalog so that the product information can be easily found and the ability to update information across many pieces of content is preserved. Eg. if the content product is copied to another language for example. We also will need to discuss the option of creating a new "copied" product on content copy.
The ability for a content editor/design to use ANY Umbraco Property editor to extend a product
Product types (product templates in other systems). This may be an area where we can double dip with Option Groups and Shared Options.
Remarks
RSS - I plan on starting the 1.3.0 branch in the next couple of weeks due to the number and complexity of some of the issues we are trying to solve. It would also be great to get as much community feedback as we can here so that we do not overextend or do it "our way" ... ;-)
Morchello looks awesome! Would there be a way to do or make an option for restaurants or online food ordering? Seems like everyone is doing some sort of typical store, like clothing, computers, etc, but not too much online food ordering platforms? Would this be in some sort of roadmap? Or an option. This would be great since online food ordering is getting much more prevelant.
Taking into account multiple store locations, store finder, menu (probably just products), variants or add ons (extra cheese, extra meat, extra ...), delivery vs pick-up at which store location, etc.
Great idea! When we designed Merchello, we had a ton of custom scenarios in mind so we built it to be for more than *just* products in a cart. There are some options that would allow you to not have to use products for menu items (unless that made the most sense).
Anyways, I'm certain it would work and could be quite elegant. There may even be another dev out here on the west coast that might want to collaborate on a package/starter kit/extension built on Merchello for this kind of thing.
Perhaps you might want to chat with Rusty and I about it over Skype sometime?
Thanks for checking out the project. Merchello from the front end perspective is pretty much an API very similar to Umbraco. We have tried to architect Merchello in such a way that developer's don't find themselves "pickled" by our ideas of what an ecommerce workflow should look like.
The concept of "multiple stores" can get pretty involved especially when you start considering invoices and payments. Merchello itself has the notion of multiple warehouses and multiple inventories per warehouse - which has more to do with shipping than multiple businesses.
If your idea is to work with multiple restaurants and have a singular account to which you would receive payments, I think the implementation would be pretty straight forward. Breaking the payments into multiple accounts is doable, but definitely a lot more involved:
What happens if someone orders from two different restaurants and pays with a single credit card payment for example. We have left points in the workflow for you to add logic that this could be accomplished, but IMO it would be a mistake to implement this sort of thing in the Merchello core as it is probably fairly edge case.
Let me know if you want to hook up on Skype sometime to do a bit of Q/A.
Just switching accounts here on the forums to my personal one since this would be for a side project and getting more involved in the Umbraco community.
I would really like to hash out some ideas. I am mainly a UI/UX designer and developer (Razor, XSLT, HTML, CSS, jQuery, design, flow, experience) so the C# portion is not my forte at the moment but I am in the process of getting up to speed on it. But a Skype call would be great to set up. I am actually out here in Colorado.
Like I said before, some sort of functionality to do a food service ordering system online would really be great. Right now it seems like there are a few pretty well done ones, but the market seems to be focused a lot on goods rather than food.
Some 'Pie in the Sky' ideas or nice to have, which may come by building on top of Merchello as you have mentioned would be: - Possibly looking at a way to upload or update products (food or otherwise) via a CSV or other file for inventory. - An option ore way to tie into some of the major restaurant ordering systems (POS) for pickup and order fulfillment. (pretty intensive, needs some thought and scope) - Among other ways
@Rusty,
The multiple restaurants would more or less be the same 'restaurant' just if they have different locations. Right now my client are a local family chain with 6 stores in the same area. I kind of figured it would be more involved. I have been doing research for the past 6 months or so on different systems and online ordering for restaurants does not seem to be an easy task. Especially for local establishments.
I am going to be digging into Merchello and digging into setting up a local environment to do some test cases on menu (products or options), locations, payments. I am just familiarizing myself with Umbraco 7.1 at the moment, I have been working with Umbraco up to verison 4.11 for a few years now in the position I am currently in. I would like to familiarize myself with Merchello for a week or 2 and then swing back and contact you both about any questions via Skype that I have with using Merchello in my instance. I hope to entend or show my use case using an Umbraco site using some sort of Umbraco based system like Merchello so others can use it in a similar way or spark more ideas, dialog, and development.
Thanks for the feedback guys and I look forward to speaking with both of you. If it OK in a few weeks, could I contact you through email (your company website emails?) or would just contacting you on here and setting up a date/time work?
We are working on a project using Umbraco 7.4.3 and Merchello 2.0.1. For this project, our client would like to be able to ship certain items from a European warehouse, drop shipping them to customers in North America (not sure about the taxation factor yet) as well as ship other products from Canada throughout North America. Is it possible to set up certain products to ship from one warehouse and others from another? If so, how do we configure this?
Also, our client would like to use Stripe as their Payment Gateway. Is there an add-on that works with Merchello 2.0.1? I saw Alex Lindgren from Flight Path's version but it doesn't look like it has been maintained in the last few years.
It is technically possible from a DB perspective, but we have not made a public UI for Multi-Warehouse.
You will need to familiarize yourself with the relationship between Warehouses, Warehouse Catalogs and Ship Countries.
All of the plumbing is there including a strategy based "BasketPackagingStrategy" which is where things really start from a Merchello perspective.
You would need to right your packaging rules into a strategy and then replace the default strategy with your strategy by changing the Merchello.config here:
What happens if a product is available in one warehouse but not the other - do you say it's not available or ship from the alternate location.
If shipping from multiple locations and the customer you might need to split the order into multiple shipments since ground shipping is not feasible from Europe to the US.
etc.
The use case we used to come up with this was a US company having a East Coast and West Coast Warehouse where we would GEO locate the delivery address to pick the closest originating warehouse in order to keep shipping charges at a minimum. It became evident very quickly that there were way too many business decisions in the process to hardcore a single implementation and thus, I opted to implement a strategy that could be replaced with something business specific.
I'd love to follow your progress with this implementation. We are hoping to really address a back ordering and returns this year and having an implementation like this would be great to consider to ensure we cover as many concerns as possible.
I have not looked at the Stripe provider but have been hoping to get to it.
I am looking for a way to show products that are "Coming Soon" on a Merchello site. I do not want people to be able to purchase the items. I want "Coming Soon" to appear as text in place of the "Add to Basket" button.
Any advice on how to add a property for a Coming Soon check box in the Merchello interface within Umbraco and add code to the files so that the above behaviour occurs?
Merchello 1.3.0
Merchello 1.3.0
Release Date: TBD
Products and Content
This update will address the product to content relationship issue. At this point we are discussing several different approaches to the problem and I will be writing an RFC to before tearing into anything at great length.
This version should provide for:
Remarks
RSS - I plan on starting the 1.3.0 branch in the next couple of weeks due to the number and complexity of some of the issues we are trying to solve. It would also be great to get as much community feedback as we can here so that we do not overextend or do it "our way" ... ;-)
Bugs
Could we make this 1.2.0 and move the customer sprint to 1.3.0?
I think getting the Content/Product stuff worked out before CodeGarden is key.
Yep - we'd better start thinking about it on Monday then ...
Morchello looks awesome! Would there be a way to do or make an option for restaurants or online food ordering? Seems like everyone is doing some sort of typical store, like clothing, computers, etc, but not too much online food ordering platforms? Would this be in some sort of roadmap? Or an option. This would be great since online food ordering is getting much more prevelant.
Taking into account multiple store locations, store finder, menu (probably just products), variants or add ons (extra cheese, extra meat, extra ...), delivery vs pick-up at which store location, etc.
Carlos,
Great idea! When we designed Merchello, we had a ton of custom scenarios in mind so we built it to be for more than *just* products in a cart. There are some options that would allow you to not have to use products for menu items (unless that made the most sense).
Anyways, I'm certain it would work and could be quite elegant. There may even be another dev out here on the west coast that might want to collaborate on a package/starter kit/extension built on Merchello for this kind of thing.
Perhaps you might want to chat with Rusty and I about it over Skype sometime?
Thanks,
Jason
Hey Carlos,
Thanks for checking out the project. Merchello from the front end perspective is pretty much an API very similar to Umbraco. We have tried to architect Merchello in such a way that developer's don't find themselves "pickled" by our ideas of what an ecommerce workflow should look like.
The concept of "multiple stores" can get pretty involved especially when you start considering invoices and payments. Merchello itself has the notion of multiple warehouses and multiple inventories per warehouse - which has more to do with shipping than multiple businesses.
If your idea is to work with multiple restaurants and have a singular account to which you would receive payments, I think the implementation would be pretty straight forward. Breaking the payments into multiple accounts is doable, but definitely a lot more involved:
What happens if someone orders from two different restaurants and pays with a single credit card payment for example. We have left points in the workflow for you to add logic that this could be accomplished, but IMO it would be a mistake to implement this sort of thing in the Merchello core as it is probably fairly edge case.
Let me know if you want to hook up on Skype sometime to do a bit of Q/A.
Thanks!
Rusty
Hi Jason,
Just switching accounts here on the forums to my personal one since this would be for a side project and getting more involved in the Umbraco community.
I would really like to hash out some ideas. I am mainly a UI/UX designer and developer (Razor, XSLT, HTML, CSS, jQuery, design, flow, experience) so the C# portion is not my forte at the moment but I am in the process of getting up to speed on it. But a Skype call would be great to set up. I am actually out here in Colorado.
Like I said before, some sort of functionality to do a food service ordering system online would really be great. Right now it seems like there are a few pretty well done ones, but the market seems to be focused a lot on goods rather than food.
Some 'Pie in the Sky' ideas or nice to have, which may come by building on top of Merchello as you have mentioned would be:
- Possibly looking at a way to upload or update products (food or otherwise) via a CSV or other file for inventory.
- An option ore way to tie into some of the major restaurant ordering systems (POS) for pickup and order fulfillment. (pretty intensive, needs some thought and scope)
- Among other ways
@Rusty,
The multiple restaurants would more or less be the same 'restaurant' just if they have different locations. Right now my client are a local family chain with 6 stores in the same area. I kind of figured it would be more involved. I have been doing research for the past 6 months or so on different systems and online ordering for restaurants does not seem to be an easy task. Especially for local establishments.
I am going to be digging into Merchello and digging into setting up a local environment to do some test cases on menu (products or options), locations, payments. I am just familiarizing myself with Umbraco 7.1 at the moment, I have been working with Umbraco up to verison 4.11 for a few years now in the position I am currently in. I would like to familiarize myself with Merchello for a week or 2 and then swing back and contact you both about any questions via Skype that I have with using Merchello in my instance.
I hope to entend or show my use case using an Umbraco site using some sort of Umbraco based system like Merchello so others can use it in a similar way or spark more ideas, dialog, and development.
Thanks for the feedback guys and I look forward to speaking with both of you. If it OK in a few weeks, could I contact you through email (your company website emails?) or would just contacting you on here and setting up a date/time work?
Thanks,
Carlos
Hey Carlos - Jason and I are both back from CG.
It's been a while since we've corresponded, so I thought I would check in =)
Hi Rusty,
We are working on a project using Umbraco 7.4.3 and Merchello 2.0.1. For this project, our client would like to be able to ship certain items from a European warehouse, drop shipping them to customers in North America (not sure about the taxation factor yet) as well as ship other products from Canada throughout North America. Is it possible to set up certain products to ship from one warehouse and others from another? If so, how do we configure this?
Also, our client would like to use Stripe as their Payment Gateway. Is there an add-on that works with Merchello 2.0.1? I saw Alex Lindgren from Flight Path's version but it doesn't look like it has been maintained in the last few years.
Thanks,
Glen
Hi Glen,
It is technically possible from a DB perspective, but we have not made a public UI for Multi-Warehouse.
You will need to familiarize yourself with the relationship between Warehouses, Warehouse Catalogs and Ship Countries.
All of the plumbing is there including a strategy based "BasketPackagingStrategy" which is where things really start from a Merchello perspective.
You would need to right your packaging rules into a strategy and then replace the default strategy with your strategy by changing the Merchello.config here:
The DefaultBasketPackagingStrategy is https://github.com/Merchello/Merchello/blob/merchello-dev/src/Merchello.Core/Strategies/Packaging/DefaultWarehousePackagingStrategy.cs
The idea is to answer questions like:
The use case we used to come up with this was a US company having a East Coast and West Coast Warehouse where we would GEO locate the delivery address to pick the closest originating warehouse in order to keep shipping charges at a minimum. It became evident very quickly that there were way too many business decisions in the process to hardcore a single implementation and thus, I opted to implement a strategy that could be replaced with something business specific.
I'd love to follow your progress with this implementation. We are hoping to really address a back ordering and returns this year and having an implementation like this would be great to consider to ensure we cover as many concerns as possible.
I have not looked at the Stripe provider but have been hoping to get to it.
We ended up not pursuing the multi-warehouse path so that simplified things a lot.
I am looking for a way to show products that are "Coming Soon" on a Merchello site. I do not want people to be able to purchase the items. I want "Coming Soon" to appear as text in place of the "Add to Basket" button.
Any advice on how to add a property for a Coming Soon check box in the Merchello interface within Umbraco and add code to the files so that the above behaviour occurs?
Could you just add a Yes/No property to the extended content and then not display the add item box (Partial) if it's checked to yes?
We will try this method.
is working on a reply...