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Adam_Andrews-Trimble - 7/26/2012 10:41:44 PM

Creating something slightly different with e-commerce

First, let me apologize if this is threaded in the wrong place - I'm very, very new. It seemed logical to post in "site structure" but if I'm mistaken, please let me know.

Quick background:
We're a manufacturer that sells B2B (business to business) we don't sell direct to consumers (but may sell swag or goody type items like t-shirts and baseball hats direct at some point.) We do market all 1,200 or so products to consumers though - via the current web site, other materials like print catalogs, brochures, etc. We then encourage end-customers to buy from our worldwide dealer network.

Here's what I want to achieve:
I want to use the existing grid layout within categories and sub-categories to display products (thumbnail photo, product name and SKU for example.) I want to be able to go ahead and drill down to a specific details page like normal. What I would ultimately like to be able to do is to keep a buy now button for swag or ("goody" items) but on everything that is sold through a retailer, I would like to be able to replace that button's function with something that would forward the customer to a W2B (where to buy) page that would either match up the product with a dealer who sells it online or locally (with the Google or Bing map) at a physical location.

I may in the future wish to sell online to the retailers in a secure "partners" type area that is of course hidden from consumers. Which is another wrinkle. Consumers could see but not buy directly from us and then retailers could buy in a secure area, etc.

So I'm not sure how to approach this.

As for the W2B solution, in old ASP I could probably build a query and some code to pass the SKU number to a page that would then run it's own query of course and plug in the received SKU for the correct data to display.

Any thoughts from the Kentico gurus? All help / suggestions are most welcome. I'm just now getting started!

Thx.

-Adam

Kentico Consulting

kentico_borisp - 8/1/2012 6:26:12 AM

RE:Creating something slightly different with e-commerce

Hello,

If you want to change the functionality of the buy button, then you can either change the default one available in the system, or you can create a custom user control, which would redirect the user to the W2B page. The default control is located in:

\CMSModules\Ecommerce\Controls\ProductOptions\ShoppingCartItemSelector.ascx.cs

I would recommend you to create a custom control, because your scenario doesn't require a lot of functionality, which is by default available in this control. The control can be registered then in the transformation, rendering the product overview. You can then redirect the user with for example a custom query in the URL to a dynamic page, which would dynamically fetch the data associated with the given SKU from the database. The custom data, such as seller location, name...etc can be either saved in a custom table a link to a SKU with the SKUID for example, or you can save the data directly to the SKU. Additional custom columns can be added through the UI in SiteManager / Development / System tables / <select one> / Fields / New attribute. If you need any details on something, please let me know and I will try to point you into the right direction.

Best regards,
Boris Pocatko


Member	aandrews-surveying - 8/14/2012 11:53:04 AM RE:Creating something slightly different with e-commerce Thanks Boris, I will look in to this. I'm still pretty new at this so we'll see how it goes :)