I'm trying to think how uCommerce might fit the requirements for my project.
Lets say I have a stage show that I am putting on in London and I set up two sites:
www.sellmyshow.uk
www.sellmyshow.ru
to sell tickets to my London show in the UK and in Russia.
Both sites will be set up in the same Umbraco instance using the hostnames functionality.
I have two sites because I want each site to be in the native language and also so that I can set different prices for each country. Unfair maybe but lets say I want the people in the UK to pay more than those in Russia.
My understanding so far of uCommerce is that a category is set up and the products are assigned to that category. The category is then assigned to a hostname and there is no way to assign a category to more than one hostname.
So it seems that I will have to create two categories:
UK Site Tickets
Russian Site Tickets
and within each one create a product:
My Show Ticket
I can see how this will enable me to easily translate the name of the category/product and also to set a different price for each product which is good.
The trouble is the show only has a fixed number of tickets and therefore the stock level needs to be shared between the sites.
If a ticket is sold on the Russian site, the stock level of the product in the UK site must also be reduced.
Is this possible to do in uCommerce as it stands now?
You assign a store to the hostname - if you leave a single store to "Default" it will be used across any site that's not directly assigned to a store. Products are fully shareable between stores, catalogs, and categories, so you don't have to maintain duplicate products between your stores.
Differentiated pricing is available on each product. Basically you assign as many prices to each product as you need and the catalog will decide which price will be displayed to the customer (you can override this if you're not happy with the default).
I've now seen how products can be shared between stores/catagories which is good.
I wanted to test how the pricing would change according to the site so I created another Store 'uCommerce.fr' also leaving the hostname as 'default'.
Product Catalog - uCommerce.dk - uCommerce - Software - Support
- uCommerce.fr - uCommerce 2 - Shoes
I set the currency for 'uCommerce.fr' to be GBP and added a new product under the 'Shoes' category.
No hostnames have been entered for the site or stores so I had expected to see the two catalogs, 'uCommerce' & 'uCommerce 2' but the 'uCommerce 2' catalog is not being displayed as an option, only 'uCommerce'.
uCommerce will lookup the store base on hostname - if no store is configured for the particular hostname it will default to the store setup up as "Default". If you've got multiple stores set the hostname "Default" uCommerce will pick the first one and go with that.
That's probably what you're seeing.
If you've got one content site you can assign two hostnames to it or if you've got different content sites assign the proper hostnames to each of them in Umbraco. With that in place navigate to each of your stores in uCommerce and select the hostname for uCommerce.fr and uCommerce.dk.
I did wonder if uCommerce was just picking the first 'Default' store it came accross and using it but wanted to make sure I wasn't just configuring things wrong.
I'm sure I'll have much less trouble when I've installed Windows 7 and can hopefully configure some proper hostnames for my local testing.
You can get it going in IIS6 by adding the hostnames to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and then assigning those same names to your IIS site. From there Umbraco will have access to both your hosts and you can get on with the task at hand :)
Can different sites share the same products?
I'm trying to think how uCommerce might fit the requirements for my project.
Lets say I have a stage show that I am putting on in London and I set up two sites:
to sell tickets to my London show in the UK and in Russia.
Both sites will be set up in the same Umbraco instance using the hostnames functionality.
I have two sites because I want each site to be in the native language and also so that I can set different prices for each country. Unfair maybe but lets say I want the people in the UK to pay more than those in Russia.
My understanding so far of uCommerce is that a category is set up and the products are assigned to that category.
The category is then assigned to a hostname and there is no way to assign a category to more than one hostname.
So it seems that I will have to create two categories:
and within each one create a product:
I can see how this will enable me to easily translate the name of the category/product and also to set a different price for each product which is good.
The trouble is the show only has a fixed number of tickets and therefore the stock level needs to be shared between the sites.
If a ticket is sold on the Russian site, the stock level of the product in the UK site must also be reduced.
Is this possible to do in uCommerce as it stands now?
Thanks,
Matt
You assign a store to the hostname - if you leave a single store to "Default" it will be used across any site that's not directly assigned to a store. Products are fully shareable between stores, catalogs, and categories, so you don't have to maintain duplicate products between your stores.
Differentiated pricing is available on each product. Basically you assign as many prices to each product as you need and the catalog will decide which price will be displayed to the customer (you can override this if you're not happy with the default).
Stock is handled in the exact way you describe.
Thanks Soren,
I've now seen how products can be shared between stores/catagories which is good.
I wanted to test how the pricing would change according to the site so I created another Store 'uCommerce.fr' also leaving the hostname as 'default'.
Product Catalog
- uCommerce.dk
- uCommerce
- Software
- Support
- uCommerce.fr
- uCommerce 2
- Shoes
I set the currency for 'uCommerce.fr' to be GBP and added a new product under the 'Shoes' category.
No hostnames have been entered for the site or stores so I had expected to see the two catalogs, 'uCommerce' & 'uCommerce 2' but the 'uCommerce 2' catalog is not being displayed as an option, only 'uCommerce'.
Perhaps my understanding is incorrect?
uCommerce will lookup the store base on hostname - if no store is configured for the particular hostname it will default to the store setup up as "Default". If you've got multiple stores set the hostname "Default" uCommerce will pick the first one and go with that.
That's probably what you're seeing.
If you've got one content site you can assign two hostnames to it or if you've got different content sites assign the proper hostnames to each of them in Umbraco. With that in place navigate to each of your stores in uCommerce and select the hostname for uCommerce.fr and uCommerce.dk.
That will get you up and running.
Thanks Soren,
I did wonder if uCommerce was just picking the first 'Default' store it came accross and using it but wanted to make sure I wasn't just configuring things wrong.
I'm sure I'll have much less trouble when I've installed Windows 7 and can hopefully configure some proper hostnames for my local testing.
Regards,
Matt
You can get it going in IIS6 by adding the hostnames to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts and then assigning those same names to your IIS site. From there Umbraco will have access to both your hosts and you can get on with the task at hand :)
Hope this helps.
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