Posted by gordon on May 1, 2006 at 8:14am
Since we are starting to come to the end of the 4.7 development and are just starting to last code tidy ups and other fix ups I would like to invite people to create a wishlist of features they would like to see in the next stable release of E-Commerce.
Just remember that just because it is on this list it doesn't mean it is going to get done.
- product features
This will allow instead of creating a tangible product, you will have a tangible product feature which you can add to all product types as you require it. - Invoicing
Allow system administrators to create invoices for customers. Once te invoice has been paid an invoice will be sent to a user via email, fax, post for them to pay.
Add any other features people would like to see to the document. I hope that if you are a member of the E-Commerce group that you can edit it. Otherwise just add comments and I will move them up.
Comments
Upgrade Pricing
Hi Gordon,
Long time no see. :)
I have a feature I've been waiting for since the ecommerce module came out. I sell software on my site and I'd like to have a way to offer upgrade pricing. So, for example, if the user has purchased product x,y or z in the past then they only pay $upgradePrice. Maybe we have two new fields, upgrade from products with a comma separated list and a upgrade price field.
I would think you would also have to add a "purchase upgrade" link next to the "add to cart" link if a product was upgradable.
The way to do this now is to
The way to do this now is to create a custom product which includes the second price.
What I would like to is part of the subscriptions is to all the renewal to be a different node.
--
Gordon Heydon
Roles
Couldn't you just assign the user with a role when they buy the first time, then use a role discount on it?
Change "add to cart" text
I'm not sure if this is in 4.6 version or not but if not I'd like to be able to change the "add to cart" text to whatever I please. Something like, "Buy Now".
I'd also like the option to turn it off the "add to cart" link so I can use my own buttons.
Use locale to change the
Use locale to change the text. This will work with 4.6 as well as 4.7.
Also you can turn off the link with the option on the product creation page.
--
Gordon Heydon
Sales Reports
I'd like to be able to see all my sales between a certain date. And if possible, have some fields tallied up.
For example, when I went to do my taxes I could not find out how many sales I had for the past year or the profit or loss I had made (ecom module only listed current year).
This was a bummer. I had to use my paypal records, export all of them to a csv file, put it into open office (excel version), weed out all the unrelated transaction and then tally them up. All it would take was a good sql statement against the ecommerce database. This simple sales report was sorely missed.
Export transactions to CSV file
Speaking of which, ;) exporting a csv file of transactions between two dates would be very handy.
What you are wanting is a GL
What you are wanting is a GL (General Ledger) Interface.
I have developed one already for a client. I need to do some tidy ups and I will be able to release it with 4.7. It may come after 4.7 is released.
--
Gordon Heydon
Affiliate & downloadable product
Will the next version has affiliate program included?
I am running an ebook download store and would like to have affiliate program so that my member get rewarded whenever his/her friends purchase an ebook from our store.
And will the next version support downloadable product as well?
I would love to see a decent affiliate program
Yes, I too would greatly appreciate some type of affiliate program.
There is a free affiliate program called Post Affiliate and here are its features:
Features:
- New affiliate subcription
- Possibility to have different amounts for different products
- Customizable layouts
Affiliates control panel:
- Clickthroughs summary and details
- Sales summary and details
- Banners/Links available view
Admin control panel:
- Clickthroughs summary and details + filter per affiliate
- Sales summary and details + filter per affiliate
- Banners/Links management
- Affiliates management
- Reset affiliate clickthroughs and sales
- suport for english, italian, german and chinese language
Here is an extensive comparison between the free Post Affiliate and the $89 (as of 5/17/06) Post Affiliate Pro. One gets a good idea from the comparison of what the minimum features should be in a Drupal-coded e-commerce affiliate module.
Thank you.
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
In the meantime...
I would also love to see the inclusion of a solid and feature rich affiliate program like Post Affiliate Pro (which I'm currently using).
What I haven't been able to find in the current version of the ecommerce modules, and could be a stop-gap measure until a proper affiliate program is built in, is a way to pass order data from Drupal to external affiliate software.
I know I can define an 'order complete' page, but no-where can I find any reference to being able to capture data such as order number, order total, and so on.
If this is available somehow, can someone please point it out to me?
http://www.PowerKeysPub.com
http://www.PowerKeysPub.com
Post Affiliate Pro launched for Drupal / Ubercart
Hello Alan,
maybe you would be interested that there is new module for Post Affiliate Pro in Drupal contributions.
You can download it from this location http://drupal.org/project/uc_post_affiliate_pro
Enjoy!
Peter
There's this cool concept called "TipIt"
You can see it in action here:
http://tipit.ws
I've tried contacting the owners, but can't seem to get a hold of them, recently. At any rate, I would love to see this integrated into ecommerce, somehow.
Albert
www.ithou.org
www.ithou.org
Service contrib module
I use the service module to do something similar, which is pay a variable amount.
However, it does not have the JS interface and has to go through the cart/checkout.
Another things to look at is the Paypal tipjar module.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Thanks, kbahey...
I'll definitely look into those options...
The other cool thing about TipIt is that the payments go right to the node author.... which takes a little SQL figuring, I think... but I'll see if I can come up with something.
www.ithou.org
www.ithou.org
Taxes and more
Well... I think it goes without saying but all those tax features we've just kinda touched in chats? Those should probably go somewhere on the wishlist :-D.
My other suggestion isn't so much a request as a idea for thought. major version changes like 4->5 are good places to put major api changes. Shipping is already getting one for 4.7 because it really just didn't meet anyone's needs but are there any thoughts for API's that could use a good sprucing? Posibilities:
Checkout: move checkout to is own module and build api to work around formapi 1/2 with more features.
Payment: I always see this one coming up in IRC chat. I don't have any huge complaints but I'm sure there are people with ideas. Also building more features for website payment systems into the payment module might be useful(eg worldpay, paypal).
Tax: see above :)
I'd also like to see the product.module be more functional. I know there has been a lot of ideas about this including CCK. The fact is currently we require you to make a new product for lots of trivial things and this could probably be updated either natively in product.module or in modules that work with CCK to provide the functionality to nodetype/product creators. yogadex will probably give me a harsh beating when this ends up making us rewrite node_to_product again.
Some ideas
Here are some ideas:
Express Checkout. In some cases, adding to cart, then checking out, adding a address, putting in credit card into, ...etc. In some cases, for example when it is an intangible, the address should be optional, and there could be an option not to have a cart at all.
Integration with ERP module. Not sure if ERP is the right module for that or not, but the more Drupal can run a business, the more it will be appealing to a wider audience.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
True recurring subscriptions
one thing that comes up a lot with ecommerce is the lack of true recurring subscriptions.
What we have today is recurring invoicing, which is inconvenient to the end user, and will cause the web site to lose business because users do not want to pay every N days.
The solution seems to have drawbacks: store credit card info (security risk), and run them thru cron every N days to renew the subscription.
Another option is integration with Paypal subscriptions.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
use "tags" for recurring payment?
e-xact (e-xact.com) the canadian payment gateway i am most familiar with has the concept of a "tag" (not to be confused with flickr or delicious tags)
you pass the credit card info in a message only once to the payment gateway
and then you get back a tag from the gateway which you store i.e. you DON'T store the credit card info
then you use the tag to do transactions until it fails which usually means the credit card has expired
in this case you prompt the user for credit card info again and pass it back to the gateway which gives you a new tag
it works quite well, i would be very surprised if other gateways don't similar concepts
it would be cool if ecommerce supported this concept
This sounds great, but none
This sounds great, but none of the other gateways that I have dealt with use this. They want to handle all the recussion them selfs. It would be good if they informed us of the payment, then we could just have them set up and then they would inform the web site that the transaction happened so that we can build the transaction, and extend the subscription.
--
Gordon Heydon
yeah we actually want both
i.e. both:
1. gateway handles recurring payment itself
2. gateway lets you handle it (perhaps via "tags" like e-xact)
What we really need is a standard recurring payment API and there isn't one. i hope that ebay/paypal in the near future do something that other gateways can clone!
Hardcorded workflow
While not about re-occurring billing exactly, a similar concept is the "authorize now, capture later" ability of many gateways. I wrote a patch specifically for authorize_net.module to do this. It was kind of hackish as I had to do all my work within authorize.net as I couldn't change the hard coded workflow in payment.
For my wish, I'd ask for a more flexible workflow system in which steps can be added and removed programmatically by modules (and by admins through a UI). This request would apply to all the workflows in e-commerce, as they all seem pretty hard coded.
-M
checkoutapi weighting
I think it would be more intuative and drupal like to incorporate the concept of weighting into a couple of places.
First would be the checkout screens. The numbering system we use now works and is simple to program but its kinda akward to admin(have to change at least 3 items to move one item). Providing a weighted admin similar to the blocks admin page could be very handy.
Second would be the review screen. The review screen could be used a lot more than it currently is and if we are going to keep it it would be invaluable to allow the items to be weighted. An example would be to weight a newsletter signup and TOS at the bottom. Allowing the designer/admin to weight these items and move them around on the page would be very handy.
I know the nastyness this is probably going to brings to some areas of our modules but this is a wishlist right!
E-Commerce already does
E-Commerce already does this, so that you can order your check screens.
take a look at admin > store > settings > checkout where you can order all your checkout screens.
This actually does both, and the cart is always the last.
If you want a different order on the reveiw page compared to the order of the checkout, you can just retheme the checkout and make them what ever order you wish.
Lastly the module weights also come into play as well in determining which order they get executed.
--
Gordon Heydon
images support
I guess the long waiting feature - as many images as possible to single product (with easy interface).
Multiple Currency Support!
This is huge for us up here in Canada. The company that I am working for would love to have this yesterday, so I'll let you know if anything happens on our end.
Rick
This is a very complex
This is a very complex development. esp. when you a doing this from an accounts POV.
Also this means also posting to multiple bank accounts.
To do this correctly we need someone who knows this area and how it can be tracked correctly.
--
Gordon Heydon
Thanks for your thoughts...
I agree that this would be very complicated. What about a stop-gap step that would allow for displaying different prices and would sell in a different currency (eg. US) but underneath, everything got transfered over to the native currency (eg. CAD) on the fly when the $ is transfered over to the merchant account. As long as this is fairly transparent to the end user it would be a good enough solution to our customers.
Let me know if you have any more thoughts about this. ...and as an aside, it looks like my workplace may be contributing some work on the ShipCalc module to add Canada Post as a shipping company. We have it working fairly well in-house.
Are there any updates on
Are there any updates on your work adding Canada Post for shipping?
I also have a client who uses CP and would be interested to see what you came up with.
We have it working in house...
We will be launching a site (or two) using the calculator early next week. My co-worker Chris did the heavy lifting with this, so I'll let him know about this message. I think there might have been a patch or two applied to the shipcalc module to get things working. Once we get some of these projects launched we'll be sure to get all of this into CVS.
Rick
May be do in this way?
i face the same needs, and so implement a advance currency formatting to payment.module. detail in here:
http://edin.no-ip.com/html/?q=node/47
http://drupal.org/node/72068
my main idea is trying to keep current price display format, but add a change for admin and user to chose the currency formatting. no change to price in database, where only give the difference meaning to it.
Edison Wong
CEO, Co-founder
PantaRei Design Limited
subcription memberships
I would love an automated membership subscription module where a user account with assigned access rights is created when purchased.
Robust Event Registration
Going beyond an individual's ability to register for an event would be great. I would like to see an event registration where folks can pay for themselves at different pricing levels, where a user can pay for guests and where the user to register for events a la carte and pay a total.
Better sales / discount handling
Hi.
Maybe someone is already developing something like this, but I'd really like to see a sales module / feature in the e-commerce package.
The following features would be a good start:
- It should be possible to specify a standard price and a "sales price" on a product. It should be possible to specify this price as a percentage or a actual price (number).
- It would also be nice to be able to specify a time interval for when the sale is "active".
These features could come in a later version and would make things a lot easier for the administrators
- Possible to create a sale for an entire taxonomy tree og term. (So that an administrator could easily put all "Programming Books" on sale with a 10% discount from 01. January till 10. January with one quick operation.
- Possible to create a "sale" (a permanent discount, in example 20%) for a specific role. The shops could then have two or more "groups" of customers. A possible scenario for this is that you can have normal prices for private consumers, while offering a permanent 20% discount to corporate customers. (just an example).
There's probably a lot more that could be done with this, but as a start it would be very nice if someone could make some basic sales functionality.
I'm not skilled enough to do this myself. And most of the e-commerce modules will probably have to be updated? Or is that the beauty of drupal, that they don't have to? :)
Thanks for any comments!
-Thomas
The building blocks for this
The building blocks for this type of module already exist. This module could be just another contrib module which allows these processes listed above as.
See the hook_product_specials() for more information.
--
Gordon Heydon
tax and shipping wishes
My personal wishlist for tax, and shipping
Tax:
- be able to give each tax a name
- be able to specify whether a tax applies to products, or products and shipping charges
- display taxes applied as individual line-items on customer receipt
Shipping:
- rates based on customers location (by user configuration, not a pre-existing service)
Also... as someone else mentioned,
Sales or Discounts:
- deduct a percentage based on purchase of "X" number of a certain product
taxes for europe
I would second this feature request. There should be a possibility to show customers a) price including taxes, b) how many % there is taxes, c) amount of taxes in currency. Maybe taxes could be set per taxonomy groups of products?
There is more to it
I've looked at ecommerce.module shortly and was disappointed by the tax features. It seems that the whole VAT/tax system has to be rewritten. Here is why:
We do not have to reinvent the wheel - there are plenty of shop systems that are already dealing very good with taxes. One might have a look at osCommmerce or xtCommerce or the like.
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen
agreed
Yes, it definitely needs a purge.
Couple of wishes
Hey, a wishlist? Wow, let's see...
actually the Banner module runs completely standalone, and takes care of pubishing/notify about expiring/unpublishing/statistics (expiring/unpublishing courtesy of the Scheduer module!).
Integrating the last version (which treats banners as nodes) with e-commerce would open up the possibility to set up banners as products and let advertisers directly purchase them in the form of ad space, impressions or clicks. The more, when the recurrent payments system will be ready (thank you sym!) it could be used to save the admin from all these operations that have to be done manually now (actually the Scheduler module just unpublishes expired banners, but that's it).
this is from a recent post in the e-commerce newsletter, talking about a module that allows online booking of accomodation for different types of structures as hotels, chalets and condos, where property owners update and manage their own room types and availability.
The author of the post (simon) says there is already beta code available somewhere on cvs (but where? couldn't find it). This would be another nice-to-have for the e-commerce package.
Thank you for considering,
Marco
Product Listing
I would love to see more robust configuration with the product listing.
For example:
Vendor Support
Something sorely needed by me, and probably others. Third Party Vendor support.
Based on Roles, vendors would have their own "storefront", while all their products would display in the main store, as well as their own mini-store (essentially a product listing filtered by the vendor name).
Vendors would also need accounting data available to them. Sales reports, Pending Payments, ability to edit product listings, submit new products, etc...
Take it a level higher and I
Take it a level higher and I give +1 for mandator/client support allowing one grand inventory, multiple clients/mandators/vendors for store management, each having one or more designated product managers for specific product categories or even particular products.
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen
Product Attributes
Text input attributes.
Sometimes you need to obtain certain pieces of information from the customer at the time of sale. It would be great to be able to add a textfield attribute so the customer can fill in a few text boxes as part of the order. The ability to make these attributes optional or required would be nice too.
Dependent attributes.
If I were selling customisable computers I may give the customer a whole bunch of drop-downs with choices of CPUs, RAM, video cards, hard drives, and so on. What I'd like is for the customer to get a different choice of, say, video cards depending on which CPU they chose, or, if they chose a small hard drive maybe I don't want to offer them choice of a tape drive.
Municipal Sales Tax
Some municipalities make merchants collect additional sales tax on top of the state sales tax. For instance, while the sales tax in Pennsylvania is 6%, the City of Philadelphia adds a 1% sales tax on top of that ... making the sales tax in Philadelphia 7%.
It would be nice if your module could account for municipal sales tax. Thank you!
eerm... that's already in
eerm... that's already in E-Commerce tax.module.
And btw: For all Non-US users this kind of VAT option is really kinky. But what am I telling here... European and German tax systems are even more monstrious.
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen
Buy One get One 50% off
I'm trying to figure out an easy way to implement a discounting system, that can be accomplished in ONE transaction. Something like: If a user buys one product it's $20, 2 are $35, 3 are $50 etc... I'd imagine this sort of thing would be useful for others as well.
There may be an existing way to implement this, but I have yet to figure it out...
VAT - Companies - Invoicing - Billing
Just discovered this group.
I made a short proposal here: http://drupal.org/node/86468 before I found out that Gordon already has plans in this direction for ecommerce 5.0.
Credit note's vs. Invoices
Additional Wishes:
Basically there is a need for different type's of invoices and different invoicing logic withing those types. I'm not an accountant so I still might have forgotten some combinations...
European tax rules mainly
European tax rules mainly depend on where a product or service is or has been created/designed/developed. So we need definitely tax rates per product and maybe even per product AND country (better: zones).
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen
Advance the Coupon system
How about this:
Advance the Coupon system. Features like custom coupon code, coupon for specific node/product and for specific roles, etc.
Facility booking system
I've been searching around for a facility booking system where members can reserve the facility (e.g projector, meeting room, etc) and admin can confirm the booking once it is paid (if payment is necessary). The status of the facility should be shown in the calendar and even better if it can be linked to an event (optional).
Does anyone know if such module exists? I've been using Drupal for simple stuffs so I have no idea how to hack a module for this. Can it be done with the existing dev modules (workflow, cck, webforms, event, calendar, etc..)
Thanks in advance!
More separation of presentation
I would love to see the store module theme screens more extensively, rather than hardcoding the contents of screens. For example, tables are run through the table theme, but not from within a themable function. This means that to change the order of elements in the table, for example, you need to hack into the core module.
Would be nice if all of the screens etc were actually themeable without touching the module.
would be happy to help out :)
Pay to Publish
It's the one missing link to being able to create a solid Classifieds recipe for Drupal. Everything else is there except a simple easy way to take a payment, through a shopping cart, to publish a specific node. That is a node, not a role.
The idea being using CCK to create a classified node type then use paypal integration to publish it.
The LM_paypal module is close, very close. But it lacks a number of features the largest being a shopping cart that would allow someone to put together a number of ads and then pay for them at the same time. It also lacks the sophistication (still in Beta) and features found already in Ecommerce.
This is not a knock on the LM_paypal module, or any module. I'm in awe of all the programmers in Drupal who have built an amazing machine.
Please........
intl. shipping + muli-tier easy to admin/use affiliate program
don't know yet if newest v3 release addresses these, but...
intl shipping
paypal cannot do a few things that it appears able to do including intl. shipping variables/calculations
a utopic module would model/map to a database of government postal/parcel shipping schedules (and maybe UPS api, etc.) and also ideally allow the admin to add/bundle her own "handling" charge into/onto the shipping total so that the end-user/shopper sees all their basic shipping/pricing options to choose from (slow to fast) that ideally also accounts for most common custom fees/hurdles.
muli-tier easy to admin/use affiliate program
choosing to migrate from basic html/paypal into an ecommerce package for me seems to hinge primarily on the affiliate module and how well it is integrates/evolves in tandem.
bulk discount pricing
the module can automatically discount on volume for same type items so the more items a user buys the greater the bulk discount credit. they should see their saving and choose to take it or "donate it".
background
i've been reviewing every other php package since 2002 against the drupal benchmark and have hesitated to install it due to its cumbersome installs ugly skins and poor use of visual real estate of yesteryear but its intelligent design and 5 years certainly makes a difference in all areas.
Many pay systems in a transaction; google/amazon; nekkid babes
I'd like to see some way to pay for an item with multiple payment systems, and to cap how MUCH of an payment system could be used to pay for each item.
This would mean that I could have deals like "pay for up to 20% of tangible products with Userpoints, and ALL of intangible products, other than the downloadable whiffle bat, which can only be paid for by paypal..."
That could be further extended so that you can pay for stuff with two different currencies, say half in dollars from your paypal dollar balance, and half in pounds from your pound balance, using a similar system to the userpoint<->dollar conversion currently used. Wouldn't be used by many, but might save a few people a slight amount in paypal/credit card currency conversions.
==
Google and Amazon payment systems would be cool.
==
And Lineage (a spammer) wrote, in a deleted post:
(Yes, I saw the spam in my inbox and cracked up)
I hope I'm not
I hope I'm not misinterpreted this thread as a place for laying EC wish list.
I have an outstanding requirements which I'd like to see introduced by the EC file module.
1. Full support of anonymous purchasing for non-shipping goods (e.g. files): at date the EC do support AP, however non-shipping goods (e.g. files) calls for special treatment that's - if transaction approved, a downloading link/url shall be presented on the confirmation page, and in the confirmation email. AP for files seems as a trivial capability, much needed, and evidently requested by many throughout the EC forum.
2. Enhancement of the sub product module to support files. For instance if you're selling music or video you might want to offer more then one format.
Please let me know if a donation is in order to jump start the project, or maybe if someone would like to step up and develop these feature outside the normal course of EC development (would need to make sure it could be contributed back to the EC though) and needs some funding.
Regards,
bulk import of Excel sheet
Hi,
another solution to update price/users/nodes in drupal is the www.dbTube.org tool.
It is a PHP script with an workflow designer. It is easy to install and didn't touch your drupal
installation.
greetings
Andreas