Hey Tito,

We are just coming off a really intense push where we have been adding features all over the board so the road map is in a bit of disarray. The best place to look at the moment is the agile board on http://issues.merchello.com - it will give you a rough idea as to what is in progress.

Now that our immediate push is coming to a close, I am hoping to get back to more regimented cyclical releases. I would love to have input as to what your priorities would and (if you'd be willing) perhaps hook you up with other community members that are likewise interested in assisting in providing guidance/suggestions with the direction we are taking Merchello.

Our current effort (1.4.0) is addressing some of the needs you mentioned:

• I am in the process of refactoring all of the back office lists to use Examine (Lucene) cached database backed paged queries so that we could allow for much larger data sets - in Customers, Invoices, Products and Orders. Basically I've reversed the way things were previously working and hitting the database with for a page of keys (ids) and pulling the full object graphs from a Lucence document (or reindexing if the document is not found).
• Reports have been started and I've introduced a new resolver so that allows for introducing new reports but sub classing a base class with an attribute. These will appear in the reports sub nav in the back office - but it is a work in progress.
• Stock management has been scratched in since initial release, but we are the order fulfillment (with back orders etc) is one of the main goals of 1.4.0.
• Customer management in the back office was introduced with 1.3.0 with more refinements in 1.4.0. If you ping me offline I will give you access to a repository of a build we are working on so that you can take a look. Eventually we are hoping to make this build more generic to release it as another example site.
• Notifications have been in there since 1.3.0 but have not yet been documented - I'd love to give you a walk through.
• Shipping tracking management - again really big push in 1.4.0
• Chat/help online is not really something that we want to put in the Merchello Core build and IMO would be a great extension or something accomplished by a 3rd party plugin.
• Discounts, promotions, customer affliation - There are at least three other groups of developers working on different scenarios at the moment and from Merchello's perspective, I've been trying to think about the various use cases and provide generic extension points. Merchello does have a "discount line item type" which has as of yet never been used, but after the order fulfillment additions have been completed will be my next focus.
• Multilingual / multi-currency is a tricky one as there are so many approaches you can take with Umbraco. Since Merchello products are "merchandised" via Umbraco content in many respects the multilingual aspects are already addressed. Multi-currency will take some tweaking on the front end, but all Merchello invoices do validate that every line item has the same currency code ... so basically it is a matter of making sure that whatever workflow you've constructed for your customers does not get cross wired - like someone adding products on the "En" site and then also trying to add products on the "Es" site that have prices in different currencies. Also, it will be up to you in the controller to designate the currency code to the payment provider and/or filter payment providers that are applicable to the different currency codes. The pricing in the Merchello back office is literally just a number that can be overridden in the line items.

I think the warehouse for drop shipping would be the way to go. This is the first inquiry I've received really expressing a need to open up this functionality - in theory it should be pretty straight forward but we would have to bump it up in our priority list (it would be great if you would write something up in issues.merchello.com explaining your use case).

Thanks Rusty!

Now we are evaluating the project and making a budget, so it is not sure we will end up developing this ecommerce site. My goal now is evaluating Merchello as an option if the project goes on. My other option would be Nopcommerce, which we have some experience, but i am looking forward using an Umbraco solution for ecommerce.

I think we could make it with Merchello, with the 1.4.0 version and some tweaks. I've got some questions:

• About going up to 10.000 products in a future, i understand that it would be possible with the back office Examine enhancements?
• Going multilingual with Umbraco is easy but i was thinking about the Merchello data, like the prices and other stuff. I dont know how other ecommerce software manage multicurrency conversions. I think the admin user saves one value for each product (ie in euros) and the ecommerce does the conversion automatically? that would be something Merchello could manage in the future, or using some third party library/plugin?
• When do you think will release the v1.4.0? i was trying the new product datatype on v1.3 but it was not final designed/styled for a customer to use it. Will it be for v1.4.0? 

Hi Tito,

My target for 1.4.0 is September 10 and yes, we are hitting the design/styling fairly aggressively. Again any comments, criticisms and/or suggestions would be appreciated in issues.merchello.com ... even if they are super small =)

I've seen a number of approaches to multicurrency ranging from setting a conversion rate per currency statically (could be datatype or configuration file) to calling out to a third party to actually get the exchange rate. Either way, your scenario fits and alleviates the otherwise really complex problems of adjusting rates for shipping, taxation, discounts, etc. at the invoice level and then having to potentially use different payment providers for various currency codes.

In other words, you use some sort of price conversion on the front end for customers but everything is ultimately billed/taxed/quoted in euros.

I am also looking at multi-currency usage, but in my case each currency would be able to set there own price and it would not be tied to the 'main' sterling price, would this be possible?

@TaoistTotty You could create a custom Umbraco data type to set pricing and then use one of the overrided AddItem methods on the Basket.

Hi Rusty,

I'm hoping to start work on a Merchello project soon which will allow people to rent products for a period of time, the cost of the product will need to be calculated based on the number of days the customer wishes to hire the product for.

When rendering a product, as well as displaying the product variants dropdown, I will need to render two fields for hire start date / hire end date, the cost will then be produced by taking the cost of the product variant and multiplying it by the number of days in the date range.

The other thing that I will need to do is check if the basket contains a rental product and if so, add a 'deposit' product to the basket, so for example, rental product = $40, deposit product = $200, shipping = $20, basket total = $260.

Upon return to base of the rental product, either the total deposit will be returned to the customer or a percentage of the deposit, perhaps 80% if the product needs to be cleaned or 50% if the product is damaged.

One other thing I would like to see in Merchello but is not essential for my project right now is ajax-update-basket functionality so when a user clicks on the 'add to basket' button, the cart total updates and the user receives a notification but they stay on the same page.

I'm not sure which of the above is currently achievable in Merchello but I would like to see it added as soon as possible.

Thanks for making this fantastic open source project, I'm looking forward to getting started with it!

Hi Martin,

This sounds like a great project and one that relates to one of our early use cases.

Merchello has quite a few ways to override the price so calculating the price should not be a problem. You would just create a method in your "RentalController" (or whatever) that calculates the price and use one of the overloaded AddItem methods on the basket. If your rental scenario means you do not have to worry about shipping and return shipping, the checkout process would be pretty straight forward since you can skip quite a lot of the standard checkout workflow and jump directly to the PrepareInvoice stage once the customer has everything they wanted to add.

Also, if you expect that the customer will be renting all items for a common period per invoice, you could consider is using the CustomerContext to store the rental start/end date so that the customer only needs to enter the information a single time. The information gets stored in the merchello cookie in a neat little serialized JSON key/value collection.

I can add you to a repository of a site we are actively building to give you some direction on the AJAX bit you mentioned. It's totally doable, the only trick is retrieving the customer in your asynchronous call - meaning you have to pass the customer key (guid) with each call and establish the customer context in your controller. It's pretty simple:

 // GetAnyByKey method retrieves either a Customer or AnonymousCustomer 
 var customer = Services.CustomerService.GetAnyByKey(customerKey);

The return deposit functionality is not quite there yet - but we are working on it as we speak. Essentially it would be a partial refund of a payment. One of the things on my task list is to extend payment providers to be able to add Angular payment collection/refund views and should be in there with 1.4.0. I will be updating the Authorize.Net and Cash payment provider with these views and will certainly help on other providers.

Love the idea and will do anything I can to help you along.

Thanks!

Rusty

Hey Rusty,

Are there any database changes from 1.3 to 1.4?  I want to use the 1.4 version in our project and want to make sure I properly upgrade it.  If there are no SQL scripts to run, I assume it's just a matter of copying over the Merchello folder in App_Plugins and copying the dlls to the bin folder, correct?

Thanks,

Ryan

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