Using Kenticos ECommerce module as a Self-Service Document Portal

Matt Latham asked on May 13, 2015 10:16

Hello,

Has anyone had experience or can offer tips on the following conundrum:

Hypothetical Scenario - We have 10 customers who need to be able to see unique content once they are logged into our website. This unique content will mainly be PDF documents. So customer1 will login and see PDFs relevant to only the products he has purchased, and customer2 will login and see documents only applicable to products he has purchased.

We had the idea to use Kenticos Ecommerce module to achieve this (it hasn't been tried yet, just an idea). The idea is this:

  1. We add all of our PDF documents to the Ecommerce Store.
  2. We create logins for each of the 10 customers
  3. We add products (PDF Documents) to each customers basket
  4. When the customer logs in, they will see those PDF documents

Of course, we realise there will be a whole feast of configuration changes to make, not to mention the CSS changes so that a customers basket doesnt look like a customers basket.

So the burning questions:

  1. Has anyone done anything remotely like this before?!
  2. Can anyone see any potential obstacles?
  3. If I update a PDF document in the Ecommerce Store, will that then update the purchased document in the customers basket? (This is a biggie, because we have a very active document cycle).

Thanks to anyone who may offer assistance on this.

Matt

Correct Answer

Brenden Kehren answered on May 13, 2015 13:33

Are there any other restrictions to that document once they have purchased it? For instance, it's only available to them for N days or months? Kentico, out of the box, offers e-products and this would be one of them, so technically it should work for your scenario.

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Recent Answers

Suneel Jhangiani answered on May 13, 2015 13:12

Personally I feel you would be better of look at other modules for implementing this.

My initial thought is to put the documents in a Media Library and to link the individual document to a product page. This way you can manage the documents in a single place.

You could display the links by using a repeater web part and set the visibility based on whether the user has purchased the product or not.

This way it would be easier to manage since customers can use the Ecommerce module as designed (ie. to purchase). You could extend the model a bit by displaying purchased products on a page and thereby creating a link to the product info which in turn has links to the documents.

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Charles Matvchuk answered on May 14, 2015 03:22

Use the e-products within the e-commerce module that Brenden mentioned. We do exactly what you need to do but we do it with .pdf maps, guides and manuals as well as e-learning video's. I also added a bit of custom code to do some other things, but you should be able to get there without it.

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Matt Latham answered on May 14, 2015 09:45

Thanks for the replies everyone, really appreciate it.

Now I know what to focus on (e-products), it will save me a lot of time.

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