Have a new client who has a retail shop with part rental business -- daily, 3-day, weekly rentals of leisure equipment. They currently have a horrible, but well meaning, static HTML site, and no real understanding of the power or glory of CMS/Drupal. If affordable, they'd like some kind of online ordering/reserving option. They manually process orders now (as in people phone them with credit card #), so they could have a low-tech solution (with room to grow) that still would be an upgrade. Would love to do the site (any site) in D7, but wondering about the development & stability of Drupal Commerce at this point.
It should be noted that I am not a PHP programmer, and have limited experience with Ubercart -- and generally stay away from e-commerce for the security implications (/liability). So, there is that challenge.
Their actual use would be for a rental reservation system -- perhaps later, they will sell merchandise from online. In a perfect Drupal world, this would be able to track the inventory (stock) on a given day. But, that might be asking for a lot, without custom development. I'm hoping to add least pass some order information -- dates of rental -- to event nodes (built on fly?) and use Rules or Sign Up to generate some reminders to staff and customer. Payment processing might be through PayPal or someone like Authorize.net.
Please chime in if you have any experience, Drupal Commerce or Ubercart, with a Drupal reservation system, and can share any considerations. I am just starting the research on this one to present a feasibility/cost report to client.
Thanks much.
Tyme
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Had chance to briefly ask
Had chance to briefly ask these folks, badboy.com -- a gorgeous D7 site! -- about their Drupal Commerce experience. Client reports that they have had good success with entering and managing products, and so far no ordering problems noted. (Ironically, I phone then to report that their site's email link was generating "undeliverable" errors.)