New to CubeCart.

[Guest Michael McGarrity]

Hi,

I'm new to CubeCart but have played about with a number of open source carts in the past (zen cart, os commerce) and more recently JShop.

I have recently been asked to quote a potential eCommerce project.

I took a look at the 'Features' which has answered a number of my queries, but I would still like some clarity on one or two desirable features we were looking for.

So here goes....

• Can the Administrator place a customer into a particular group once registered. We hope to have both Regular Customers and Trade Customers use this site and would like to offer deals to Trade.
  

• Is there a Special Offers function with CubeCart to allow an Administrator to add products to?
  

• Can we integrate it with SAGE software?
  

• At the Checkout, can a customer select to 'Gift' an item and choose a different location for it to be posted to? E.g. for a Birthday.
  

• Is there Content Management functionality to allow the Administrator to have and edit an About Us page along with other pages on the site?
  

• What are the SEO Capabilities of CubeCart? How much control over meta data on a product/category basis do we have?
  

• How does it handle a user buying multiple items with multiple different recipient addresses?
  

• How does it calculate Postage on Multiple Products? The Products would require postage to be based on the weight of the product
  
  • Can Customer Payment details be stored online or is this frowned upon?
    

• Each unique Product will come in 4 different sizes. Each size has a different price associated with it. Could I still call this under one product ID, but just use a 'size' attribute to determine the price. Does this make sense, or is there already a workaround for this?
  

I realise this is a lot to take in, and greatly appreciate anyone helping out with this.

If I can help clarify any issues we have, I'll gladly do this.

Many thanks once again for any help.

[vokf]

Can the Administrator place a customer into a particular group once registered. We hope to have both Regular Customers and Trade Customers use this site and would like to offer deals to Trade.

Yes, but via a 3rd Party Mod (commerical)

Is there a Special Offers function with CubeCart to allow an Administrator to add products to?

There is a "Sale" mode, which can be switched on a product basis, this provides a "Sale" area.

Can we integrate it with SAGE software?

Sorry -I can't help. I know some use SAGE, but I don't know if its a basic CSV export, or a 3rd Party Mod.

At the Checkout, can a customer select to 'Gift' an item and choose a different location for it to be posted to? E.g. for a Birthday.

Alternate shipping location is built-in as an option. Store owners may decided to only ship to billing addresses for security, or allow different shipping address.

Is there Content Management functionality to allow the Administrator to have and edit an About Us page along with other pages on the site?

Yes, these are called "SiteDocs", CC3 & CC4 use the FCKeditor, and images/flash etc may be used.

What are the SEO Capabilities of CubeCart? How much control over meta data on a product/category basis do we have?

CC4 provides "nice urls", so http://yourdomian/category name/product name/prod_id

a real-world example;

http://www.accidentpreventionproducts.com/...oop/prod_5.html

Each product/category/site doc allows control over meta-title, keywords, description.

How does it handle a user buying multiple items with multiple different recipient addresses?

Possibly via a 3rd Party Mod. Currently not part of the basic product anyway.

How does it calculate Postage on Multiple Products? The Products would require postage to be based on the weight of the product

A few shipping options exist. I've used weight, and the client has had to supply the weight of each product.

Can Customer Payment details be stored online or is this frowned upon?

100% frowned apon. Check with the Merchant agreement of your clients. Best route is to pass payment processing to a 3rd Party (this will vary with your clients merchant agreement and location)

Each unique Product will come in 4 different sizes. Each size has a different price associated with it. Could I still call this under one product ID, but just use a 'size' attribute to determine the price. Does this make sense, or is there already a workaround for this?

This is termed "Product options", you can define your own attributes, and then specify the options for each (size/colour/length/speed ...). Each option can vary the price as percentage, absolute value or not at all.

Your best way to evaluate CC is to download and install the free trial. This lasts for 30 days, so should be enough time to get a feel for functionality.

This forum is mainly to discuss the core functionality of CubeCart (so "out of the box") set-up and install.

For modifications/tweaks/customisation, there is cubecartforums.org which has a large level of downloads (free and commercial) and also commercial status developers who can provide custom work.

Hope this helps,

Jason

[Guest Michael McGarrity]

Many thanks for the reply.

Quick question.

Can you confirm if there is a module to connect CubeCart with Sage Line 50?

[Guest Roger Huston]

Hello,

Vokf answered all the questions pretty well. However, from the user end, let me add a few notes.

1. SEO - You can add title, description and keywords for each product, but you will NEED a third-party mod for the URLs. In addition, plan on quite some time fixing all the validation errors in the the templates. Unfortunately, none of the templates are tableless and worse, many of the built in stuff is built on tables. You will never be able to get rid of all of them, but with time you can mitigate the damage. Just know, that the CubeCart people have a very cursory knowledge of SEO.

2. Customer Groups - We have that mod and it works great. Estelle makes some of the best mods out there!

3. Postage on Multiple Products - Plan on spending quite a bit of time with this. Weight is the primary calculator that most people use as it makes the most sense. The build in mods may work, but you will more than likely need an external mod from Estelle to help. Please note, that shipping charges are not an exact science. Even if you get a quote from UPS through the module, it may not be exact as the module does not calculate additional charges. In the end, you will just have to add a little bit to each sale to account for shipping variances.

4. Multiple Items with Multiple Addresses - No mod exists for this and if you want to write one, plan on spending quite some time developing it yourself.

5. Customer Payment Info - No, CC is not stored anywhere. Even if you use Authorize.net it is not stored there either. If your sites have sign-up that demands re-occurring payments you probably will have to use PayPal. - There is hope. If you use Authorize.net they have a "Customer Information Module" that will allow you to store all your customer info offsite and on theirs. However, no one has built a plug-in yet for it. If you should develop one, you could offset development costs by selling it to the community.

6. Product Options - you will need a mod for this to work well. Estelle again has good stuff for this. The built in stuff won't do what you want it to do.

7. SAGE - there isn't a plug-in for this, but with a little development effort you could write something yourself. MySQL is easy to work with and you can probably write your own export module. If SAGE has a MySQL connector, you might even be able to write something that can work with the orders table directly.

Lastly, even though you pay for CubeCart, it is not a complete product. Expect to spend quite some time in the code fixing, tweaking, changing the code. There are a lot of gotchas in the product. The biggest is during check-out. Once the customer goes from the cart to the payment screen an order is created in the backend at this point. If the customer decides to back-out of the payment process to add another product, the order is canceled in the back end and the user can be left with a blank cart. Note: this was a fix to the previous behavior.

Just know that CubeCart is far from perfect and you will need to spend time deep in the code to really get a first rate cart. Still, when you compare what is out there, it is still the most mature option. Magento has promise, but it is still a ways from being a mature product. Also, know, that you will need to spend some money on Mods. They are FAR cheaper than trying to do the work yourself. We have paid for over a dozen mods for our store.

[vokf]

Just adding a bit more input to Rogers post;

1. SEO - You can add title, description and keywords for each product, but you will NEED a third-party mod for the URLs. In addition, plan on quite some time fixing all the validation errors in the the templates. Unfortunately, none of the templates are tableless and worse, many of the built in stuff is built on tables. You will never be able to get rid of all of them, but with time you can mitigate the damage. Just know, that the CubeCart people have a very cursory knowledge of SEO.

The most important pages are "viewProduct" (hopefully full of unique content!), and these generally will have no Tables unless options are used. In this case, the HTML tables are normally below the important product text. Use of Tables for tabulated data is still perfectly valid (thinking order history/basket etc)

On a very basic product (clean install of 4.4.1, I'm actually seeing 1 validation error (nested <p>aragraphs).

This could be easily fixed, and I cannot see much evidence that minor errors like this will hit SEO.

As with all tools, some users will need additional support, and many users will want to customise one of the built-in templates, or use a different one (self built/free or 3rd party commercial)

5. Customer Payment Info - No, CC is not stored anywhere. Even if you use Authorize.net it is not stored there either. If your sites have sign-up that demands re-occurring payments you probably will have to use PayPal. - There is hope. If you use Authorize.net they have a "Customer Information Module" that will allow you to store all your customer info offsite and on theirs. However, no one has built a plug-in yet for it. If you should develop one, you could offset development costs by selling it to the community.

There is the CardCapture payment method is CC4. This WILL store the credit card details on the system.

I would not personally recommend this, but do understand that this is a common request by those with existing Merchant Accounts.

Jason