Inventory, VARs, multiusers (was: Creating New_Account.html)

[Derek Simkowiak <dereks@kd-dev.com>]

******    message to minivend-users from Derek Simkowiak <dereks@kd-dev.com>     ******

> Is it possible to start a user from the New_account.html without having
> them pick a product first?
> I need to have a wholesale_userdb and a retail_userdb and only display
> certain information  from products.asc to each group.

	I'm trying to set up something similar; I want to have different
prices listed, depending on whether the customer is a "Retail" customer or
a "VAR" customer (Value Added Reseller--the VARs get the product at a
discounted price).  I am also curious on how to get the customer to "Log
In" before perusing the catalog.

	There are two points to this: first, can we look at their Cookie
to see who they are when they first hit the site, and second, if they
don't have a Cookie, what action should be taken?

	Also, there's another feature I'm trying to create: Inventory
control for different attributes of products.  I want to have a single SKU
for a product that may come in different sizes, i.e., a T-Shirt has the
SKU 99-102, but the shirt comes in Small, Medium, Large, and X-Large.  I
want to track inventory for this shirt.

	Obviously, simply having a database that
stores "SKU:Quantity_in_Stock" in insufficient, because I may have 50
T-Shirts, but they are all of the size "Small".  When somebody orders an
X-Large T-shirt, I would think I had 50 T-shirts in stock, but I wouldn't
actually have any X-Large ones.  I consider this a fatal flaw in the
"inventory.asc" example file that comes with the "simple" example store.

	One must also consider that different sizes can also come in
different colors.  I may have an X-Large t-shirt in stock, but do I have
that in red?

	A friend of mine got around this problem by creating a different
SKU for each permutation of size and color, but I consider that to be a
clunky workaround.  Does anyone have any ideas?

	Finally, I'm trying to assertain any complications with having
multiple companies on one physical server.  Would the easiest thing to do
simple be to create login account on the machine for each store, and have
the vlink/tlink program run as the user for that particular store?  Does
anyone have any experience with this?  Each store should NOT have access
to the other stores' databases.

	And what about VeriSign certificates--does each "store" have its
own, or is there one single one for all stores residing on that one box?

	Any help is greatly appreciated. 

Thanks,
Derek Simkowiak
dereks@kd-dev.com

P.S.> (Just in case): A SKU is the same as a Product Code

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