I've been evaluating uCommerce for my company with the goal of making it the default eCommerce package for any future clients. So far I've been very impressed.
I just have a few questions that I was hoping you could answer? Sorry if these are covered elsewhere in the forum or documentation, but I've only had a limited time to look:
Payment Providers
You support a number of “out-of-the-box” payment providers.
Which, if any, of these providers support “inline” payment capture? By this I
mean when payment details can be captured on the same server as opposed to
handing off to a remote merchant site?
For those that support it, does this require extra work above and beyond
the standard "out-of-the-box" configuration? Does uCommerce capture and store any sensitive data
(i.e. credit card numbers) or are these just passed on? Any issues with using SSL for Umbraco back-end?
Membership
I understand how customer members can be created via orders (you
add them into an Umbraco membership type and group). To store things like billing address,
shipping address etc. do I presume you need to extend the membership type to
capture this? I just note on the demo site (in address.aspx) there is a
drop-down called ‘Addresses’ that never gets populated. Are there specific
fields you can add to the membership type for this to work in the demo? Or is it just a case of "rolling your own".
Razor
Being built around .NET classes I can see that it is
relatively simple to integrate with Razor scripts in Umbraco (and the code-base looks really well written!). However, is there
a version of the demo store package that is written using Razor templates? It’s obviously a
lot easier to look at working Razor examples rather than trying to figure it
out by “translating” the XSLT.
Email Confirmations
I’m a bit confused about how email confirmations work? I can
see there are settings in Settings > Profiles. I can also see there are
pages in main store site (Shop > Emails) and also a template called Email.aspx
that has no macros in it. But in the demo store no email confirmations are
sent?
I may well have more questions, but those are enough for now, I'm sure :) Look forward to working with you.
This may seem like a dumb question, but which version is the one that you can download from your main site? I thought this was the free version, but it seems to be the full version according to the featurs I'm seeing? Presumably this is a trial or only runs on local host?
Reporting
One feature that seems a little weak is the reporting (Analytics). Are there only two reports that ship with uCommerce (ie. Products Top 10 and Orders)? Or are there more that can be configured? Is it possible to expand this or build bespoke reports? Can reports export to popular formats (such as CSV / Excel) ?
Catalog Management
I can't see any features to export or import products? Is this something this is possible? For instance, could products be bulk uploaded?
Thanks for taking a look at uCommerce. Much appreciated!
Payment Providers
The default payment providers all use the "hosted payment form" method for integration with payment gateways. This is done to avoid imposing PCI requirements on our customers.
That said it's certainly possible to do an API integration, in fact it's pretty trivial compared to the hosted payment form approach.You can even reuse the large chunks of the built-in providers as the integration method for Acquire, Void, and Refund typically is the same for both hosted and direct integration method. Haven't seen an example of this not being the case yet and I've seen a lot of gateways at this point :)
uCommerce doesn't rely on members for customer info (some sites might not use it at all). Rather we create customer and address objects internally and link those to members if they are available. The reason being that order information cannot change when the member is updated.
The addresses box is populated by customer addresses, as opposed to order addresses. The reason it's empty by default is that no customer addresses are added to accounts by default.
Razor
When we started out building uCommerce XSLT was the default and thus we went with XSLT for the default store implementation. Things have changed though and the next version of the default store for Umbraco 5 will be based on Razor, seeing as it's the only development model and all. Oh, and Razor is a truly awesome way to develop sites :)
Email Confirmations
Yes. This is an example of why we need a new default store, other than the fact that Umbraco was completely rewritten naturally :)
E-mails in uCommerce work off the principle that we want to enable you to set up the e-mail content like you would any other page in the system. uCommerce then issues a request for the page the e-mail is to be sent and gets Umbraco to render it. There's more detail in Sending E-mail using uCommerce.
Evaluation
Developer Edition is Enterprise Edition. Everything is enabled. The main difference is that dev ed will put up a banner on your site if it's requested from an external IP address. We wanted a simple licensing mechanism that wasn't too intrusive. This is it.
Reporting
Analytics is meant primarily to be a place you put custom reports by extending the back UIs. Extending uCommerce Admin details how to do it. BTW this works for all UIs in uCommerce, not just reports. So you can add your own product editor or order processing UI for example. Exporting is not supported out of the box.
Catalog Management
It's not there. You can definitely add the capability by using the technique outlined in the article above. We're working on uConnector, which is a general purpose integration engine that addresses this very need. It's currently in beta and your more than welcome to take a look if you're interested.
Many, many thanks, Soren, for all your answers. I'm going to recommend we go forward with uCommerce, so hopefully I will be back in due course with more questions :)
regarding the question abou members above - how do you link customer records to member records? Is this an API call that we would need to make or is it somehow done automatically by uCommerce (and if automatic, how does it identify the relevant member)
Each customer record has an optional member id, which links the two. When the link is created automatically it's typically done either via e-mail or if a member is logged in that one will be linked.
A few questions from a potential customer
I've been evaluating uCommerce for my company with the goal of making it the default eCommerce package for any future clients. So far I've been very impressed.
I just have a few questions that I was hoping you could answer? Sorry if these are covered elsewhere in the forum or documentation, but I've only had a limited time to look:
Payment Providers
You support a number of “out-of-the-box” payment providers. Which, if any, of these providers support “inline” payment capture? By this I mean when payment details can be captured on the same server as opposed to handing off to a remote merchant site? For those that support it, does this require extra work above and beyond the standard "out-of-the-box" configuration? Does uCommerce capture and store any sensitive data (i.e. credit card numbers) or are these just passed on? Any issues with using SSL for Umbraco back-end?
Membership
I understand how customer members can be created via orders (you add them into an Umbraco membership type and group). To store things like billing address, shipping address etc. do I presume you need to extend the membership type to capture this? I just note on the demo site (in address.aspx) there is a drop-down called ‘Addresses’ that never gets populated. Are there specific fields you can add to the membership type for this to work in the demo? Or is it just a case of "rolling your own".
Razor
Being built around .NET classes I can see that it is relatively simple to integrate with Razor scripts in Umbraco (and the code-base looks really well written!). However, is there a version of the demo store package that is written using Razor templates? It’s obviously a lot easier to look at working Razor examples rather than trying to figure it out by “translating” the XSLT.
Email Confirmations
I’m a bit confused about how email confirmations work? I can see there are settings in Settings > Profiles. I can also see there are pages in main store site (Shop > Emails) and also a template called Email.aspx that has no macros in it. But in the demo store no email confirmations are sent?
I may well have more questions, but those are enough for now, I'm sure :) Look forward to working with you.
Can't seem to edit above post, so:
Forget the email questions - I figured it out :)
Evaluation
This may seem like a dumb question, but which version is the one that you can download from your main site? I thought this was the free version, but it seems to be the full version according to the featurs I'm seeing? Presumably this is a trial or only runs on local host?
Reporting
One feature that seems a little weak is the reporting (Analytics). Are there only two reports that ship with uCommerce (ie. Products Top 10 and Orders)? Or are there more that can be configured? Is it possible to expand this or build bespoke reports? Can reports export to popular formats (such as CSV / Excel) ?
Catalog Management
I can't see any features to export or import products? Is this something this is possible? For instance, could products be bulk uploaded?
Hi Dan,
Thanks for taking a look at uCommerce. Much appreciated!
Payment Providers
The default payment providers all use the "hosted payment form" method for integration with payment gateways. This is done to avoid imposing PCI requirements on our customers.
That said it's certainly possible to do an API integration, in fact it's pretty trivial compared to the hosted payment form approach.You can even reuse the large chunks of the built-in providers as the integration method for Acquire, Void, and Refund typically is the same for both hosted and direct integration method. Haven't seen an example of this not being the case yet and I've seen a lot of gateways at this point :)
Integrating uCommerce with a Payment Provider documents how to do it.
Membership
uCommerce doesn't rely on members for customer info (some sites might not use it at all). Rather we create customer and address objects internally and link those to members if they are available. The reason being that order information cannot change when the member is updated.
The addresses box is populated by customer addresses, as opposed to order addresses. The reason it's empty by default is that no customer addresses are added to accounts by default.
Razor
When we started out building uCommerce XSLT was the default and thus we went with XSLT for the default store implementation. Things have changed though and the next version of the default store for Umbraco 5 will be based on Razor, seeing as it's the only development model and all. Oh, and Razor is a truly awesome way to develop sites :)
Email Confirmations
Yes. This is an example of why we need a new default store, other than the fact that Umbraco was completely rewritten naturally :)
E-mails in uCommerce work off the principle that we want to enable you to set up the e-mail content like you would any other page in the system. uCommerce then issues a request for the page the e-mail is to be sent and gets Umbraco to render it. There's more detail in Sending E-mail using uCommerce.
Evaluation
Developer Edition is Enterprise Edition. Everything is enabled. The main difference is that dev ed will put up a banner on your site if it's requested from an external IP address. We wanted a simple licensing mechanism that wasn't too intrusive. This is it.
Reporting
Analytics is meant primarily to be a place you put custom reports by extending the back UIs. Extending uCommerce Admin details how to do it. BTW this works for all UIs in uCommerce, not just reports. So you can add your own product editor or order processing UI for example. Exporting is not supported out of the box.
Catalog Management
It's not there. You can definitely add the capability by using the technique outlined in the article above. We're working on uConnector, which is a general purpose integration engine that addresses this very need. It's currently in beta and your more than welcome to take a look if you're interested.
Hope this helps.
Many, many thanks, Soren, for all your answers. I'm going to recommend we go forward with uCommerce, so hopefully I will be back in due course with more questions :)
That's wonderful news indeed! Looking forward to working with you :)
Soren,
regarding the question abou members above - how do you link customer records to member records? Is this an API call that we would need to make or is it somehow done automatically by uCommerce (and if automatic, how does it identify the relevant member)
TIA
Tom
Each customer record has an optional member id, which links the two. When the link is created automatically it's typically done either via e-mail or if a member is logged in that one will be linked.
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