Posted by Dan Kimble on October 2, 2012 at 5:09pm
Local Foods Plymouth (http://www.localfoodsplymouth.org/) is an online farmers market for the Plymouth, NH area. They are currently using ZenCart but are receiving a lot of negative comments in association with the site.
A key ability is for all products to be displayed even though you can only purchase during specific hours: Monday Noon through Tuesday PM weekly.
Not having played with Commerce before and my Drupal experience being very new, would Commerce work well for this type of store situation? Everything would need to be very easy for a non-web person to be able to manage the store.
Comments
Question: will there just a
Question: will there just a single person entering products or will there be something like a marketplace?
You can use rules or other code to control whether the add to cart button is displayed and availablity of products.
Single User
There would be just a single admin person who is responsible for adding items, changing prices, running reports. Obviously anyone needs to be able to purchase.
Rules sub-question
Can the rules be setup to "open" the store at Noon on Monday and then "close" the store at midnight on Tuesday? Still leaving all purchase quantities so reports can be run Wednesday morning of who purchased what.
Ok. If there is a single
Ok. If there is a single admin person adding stuff, Drupal Commerce will be fine (so would ubercart or likely other e-commerce stuff)
By open, I'm not quite sure what you mean. Rules and Rules scheduler could be used to enable/disable products which would limit the add to cart according. Purchased products are separated when placed into the shopping cart or when an order is completed, so there will be no conflicts. By reports, I'm assuming you mean what was bought reports, etc.
I took a quick look at your
I took a quick look at your site: http://www.localfoodsplymouth.org/. I'm not quite sure about what you can do with ZenCart but converting to Drupal will give you a lot of things you aren't getting and tons of other modules to improve the site overall (forums, maps, chat, blog, etc). Based on what I'm seeing in the site, you can probably get a lot of the same functionality and beyond by adding some taxonomy (or user references) to products, then use views to create dynamic views accordingly. Check Out Commerce Kickstart 2.x to get a great starting place with Drupal and Drupal Commerce stuff.
Staff Support
One non-technical consideration that might be of help is to consider adding a sharp high-schooler or two. We have seen this strategy really work based on our having helped a number of farms and other agricultural organizations.
Our farm's non-profit, The Lost Arts Collaborative www.LostArtsNA.org provides assistance with Drupal 7, Drupal Commons, and are about to get support going for Drupal Commerce in 2013. We're in Still River, MA (part of the town of Harvard).
Why closing?
If the product offer is rather stable, you might as well leave the shop open, receive a whole week of orders and only deliver on Monday / Tuesday. The stock management can prevent that you get too many orders or you can see from the orders (like the baked stuff) how much should be ready by next Monday. You would most likely see sales going up.
imho the use of good photos is essential in on-line business. People that cannot be physically present at least should have a good idea what they are ordering. You might not have discovered how ZenCart can support larger images, but at least I can tell that in Drupal Commerce or Ubercart you can have that.
Make the "bug" into a feature
Allow people to buy at any time, but state that orders must be collected from the next market.
Make sure you take their money with the order :-)
Drupal Commerce is great and, FWIW I love the AT Commerce theme.