Mailing List Archive: some newbie questions

Hi, all!

I am absolutely new to interchange, and I haven't set up
any comparable e-commerce system so far. I am in the
process of choosing the open source solution that best
suits my needs: hosting several online shops on a single
server and offering the use of this e-commerce system
to small to medium size businesses.

Interchange looks and feels nice, but I would like to
hear about your experiences with it. To be a little more
precise, these are questions that matter to me:

*) Why did you choose Interchange?

*) What other open source solutions are worth being tested?

*) What difficulties did you encounter when using what is
referred to in the manuals as "multiple catalogues"?
(which seems to be what I referred to as "several online
shops on one server, correct me if I am wrong)

*) I would like to hear your opinion on this problem: In many
cases, it is desirable to restrict access to certain items to
certain customer groups (like resellers, ...) or to display an item's
price according to the customer's group. (with / without taxes for
resellers, ...).
Would you set up one catalogue for each customer group and
manage access control on the first page, letting customers log
into "their" catalogue, or is it possible to do all this using only
one catalogue?

Thanks in advance for your comments

Flo

*) Why did you choose Interchange?

For me, it was these features (in order of importance):
Open source, unix, easily extensible (very important), good database
connectivity, stable, fast, perl.

Basically, it's what I would build if I was going to build an e-commerce
solution from the ground up.

>*) What other open source solutions are worth being tested?

There are a few dozen open source e-commerce apps out there. Interchange
is the best, but Zelerate doesn't suck that bad (I don't think it can hold
a candle to IC, but it might be worth looking at). Zelerate just lost 30%
of their employees though, probably from the recent .com flu that's been
going around.

>*) What difficulties did you encounter when using what is
>referred to in the manuals as "multiple catalogues"?
> (which seems to be what I referred to as "several online
> shops on one server, correct me if I am wrong)

No probs whatsoever. In fact, you can run multiple versions of IC
processes that are each serving multiple catalogs! (whoa). For example,
one could have separate production catalogs (IC 4.6.1) and development
catalogs (on 4.7.x).

>*) I would like to hear your opinion on this problem: In many
>cases, it is desirable to restrict access to certain items to
>certain customer groups (like resellers, ...) or to display an item's
>price according to the customer's group. (with / without taxes for
>resellers, ...).
>Would you set up one catalogue for each customer group and
>manage access control on the first page, letting customers log
>into "their" catalogue, or is it possible to do all this using only
>one catalogue?

Try out IC for yourself -- have you seen the "Affiliates" functionality?

HTH
-Dan