When a customer has a lot of products it becomes unwieldy to sort products in the normal way through the Umbraco interface using the 'drag and drop' sort feature.
Is there an easier way to sort products either out of the box (or package) or are we looking at custom development. It seems a limitation for any eCommerce system with more than 30 or so products in one category so I figure there must be something.
Since products in Tea Commerce are essentially just Umbraco content nodes, you're really limited to what can be done in Umbraco. Ordinarily this is the manual drag'n'drop. There is however a package called 'Auto sort' which allows you to sort child nodes based on any selected property. I'm not sure if it's compatible with the latest versions of Umbraco but certainly when I've used it (around 4.7 I think?) it worked very nicely indeed.
Thanks Dan. We are using 6 so it may not be compatible I suspect but looks like a good option.
It seems the limitations of Umbraco don't really make it a credible choice of a large eCommerce platform? I've not tried uCommerce though. Have you tried this and does it have the same limitations due to Umbraco?
I've not tried uCommerce but as far as I know it uses the Umbraco tree-structure for products too, so it would be unlikely to handle the bulk inventory management any better than Tea Commerce.
Really, my general feeling towards the common Umbraco e-commerce platforms (Tea Commerce, uCommerce and uWebshop) is that they are great if you want to add an e-commerce facility to your Umbraco website. They're also typically pretty flexible in that you can create a lot of custom functionality. However, ultimately they are all packages which install into Umbraco so you're relying on the Umbraco interface and framework through which to manage your shop. For me this is usually a good thing as my customers are familiar with the interface and the process is centralised and streamlined.
If you want a more e-commerce-centric platform to begin with, which is built purely around e-commerce and has the CMS part as the added bolt-on, then it may be worth looking at something like NopCommerce. I've not used it since they went MVC, which may have ironed out my early concerns over it as a platform (terrible mark-up, complicated to extend etc) but out-of-the-box it's much more feature-rich than any of the Umbraco e-Commerce packages. It's a different kettle of fish though.
Great. Thanks Dan. I can accross this pain with an exisiting client but have taken on a new site with even more products and this was a concern for me. I think you are right, a different platform is probably the way to go.
All our e-commerce sites running Umbraco uses programatically sorted product lists. Sorted by name or created date or maybe it doesn't matter to them. Yes, the drag and drop sort in Umbraco does not work very well with large numbers of nodes, so in those cases a solution with auto sort of some kind is prefered.
We have a few shops integrated with ERP systems and they are running with hundreds of products. Again with autosorting.
Hi Rune. That's a good point. If we could allow sorting in the UI or by created date then this would be less of a problem. Sorted by created date solves a lot of problems for customers wanting new products to appear first. Assume this is something that is possible through the API?
Sorting Products / Nodes
When a customer has a lot of products it becomes unwieldy to sort products in the normal way through the Umbraco interface using the 'drag and drop' sort feature.
Is there an easier way to sort products either out of the box (or package) or are we looking at custom development. It seems a limitation for any eCommerce system with more than 30 or so products in one category so I figure there must be something.
Thanks,
Mark
Hi Mark,
Since products in Tea Commerce are essentially just Umbraco content nodes, you're really limited to what can be done in Umbraco. Ordinarily this is the manual drag'n'drop. There is however a package called 'Auto sort' which allows you to sort child nodes based on any selected property. I'm not sure if it's compatible with the latest versions of Umbraco but certainly when I've used it (around 4.7 I think?) it worked very nicely indeed.
Hope this helps :)
Thanks Dan. We are using 6 so it may not be compatible I suspect but looks like a good option.
It seems the limitations of Umbraco don't really make it a credible choice of a large eCommerce platform? I've not tried uCommerce though. Have you tried this and does it have the same limitations due to Umbraco?
Thanks,
Mark
Hi Mark,
I've not tried uCommerce but as far as I know it uses the Umbraco tree-structure for products too, so it would be unlikely to handle the bulk inventory management any better than Tea Commerce.
Really, my general feeling towards the common Umbraco e-commerce platforms (Tea Commerce, uCommerce and uWebshop) is that they are great if you want to add an e-commerce facility to your Umbraco website. They're also typically pretty flexible in that you can create a lot of custom functionality. However, ultimately they are all packages which install into Umbraco so you're relying on the Umbraco interface and framework through which to manage your shop. For me this is usually a good thing as my customers are familiar with the interface and the process is centralised and streamlined.
If you want a more e-commerce-centric platform to begin with, which is built purely around e-commerce and has the CMS part as the added bolt-on, then it may be worth looking at something like NopCommerce. I've not used it since they went MVC, which may have ironed out my early concerns over it as a platform (terrible mark-up, complicated to extend etc) but out-of-the-box it's much more feature-rich than any of the Umbraco e-Commerce packages. It's a different kettle of fish though.
Good look with picking the right platform.
Great. Thanks Dan. I can accross this pain with an exisiting client but have taken on a new site with even more products and this was a concern for me. I think you are right, a different platform is probably the way to go.
Thanks,
Mark
Hi Mark,
All our e-commerce sites running Umbraco uses programatically sorted product lists. Sorted by name or created date or maybe it doesn't matter to them. Yes, the drag and drop sort in Umbraco does not work very well with large numbers of nodes, so in those cases a solution with auto sort of some kind is prefered.
We have a few shops integrated with ERP systems and they are running with hundreds of products. Again with autosorting.
/Rune
Hi Rune. That's a good point. If we could allow sorting in the UI or by created date then this would be less of a problem. Sorted by created date solves a lot of problems for customers wanting new products to appear first. Assume this is something that is possible through the API?
Thanks,
Mark
Umbraco makes sorting on all node properties, both inbuilt as well as custom, very easy. So no problems there.
/Rune
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