Research

Anyone experienced with Drupal based B2B trade lead directories ?

Something like Alibaba.com or EC21.com

Thanks

Marcel
http://www.Motorology.com
http://Tinyhttp.com

I was doing some research and came across these 2 directories. I thought might be inspirational. Please add more

thanks

www.touchlocal.co.uk
www.localbrit.co.uk

I see people are considering using cck_field_permission to distinguish between basic and premium fields on a listing node.

Using this setup does a user buy premium access for a single listing or once they get premium role they can post as many premium listings as they feel like

Hi, I have been working on an Drupal implementation for a Business Directory for some time now and are a bit stuck on how different user roles could be set up.

I'm at a fork in the road and looking for input. Should I limit each node to one location? My thoughts so far:

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I know many of you are interested in having different levels of listings with the user paying for premium listings. This is certainly crucial for me and something that I have spent most of my time working on. The object being that a premium member can add more details then a basic member and their listing would be placed above the basic listings.

I have tested the following modules for suitability of collecting payment from users:
1. Pay per node (part of ecommerce)
2. Paypal node (part of ecommerce)
3. LG Paypal (not part of ecomerce).

There are two main ways of approaching this:

I'm interested in hearing thoughts about filling your directory up with information. There's three approaches I can think of:

1) Build the structure and wait for people to add their own businesses

2) Get out the phone book and do it yourself (or hire someone)

3) Contact businesses and encourage them to either give you info or do it themselves

I've been thinking about what should go in an expanded listing versus a paid listing. On the one hand, I would like as much information as possible in the listing to make it useful to my users. On the other, it would be nice to be able to charge for an expanded listing to help pay for the site and people are only going to pay if the expanded listing is beneficial to them. So where do I draw the line?

Here are my current thoughts:

BASIC
Name
Location (Mapped)
Phone number
Website
Email
Description
Hours

Some work towards a Business Directory may already have been addressed by the recently released Openresort Community Edition
http://drupal.org/project/openresort

If someone would like to volunteer to look at that implementation, it may be a reasonably simple task of pulling out the relevant code and wrapping it up in an independent module.