[ic] Creating a sub shop

[Paul Jordan]

Jamie Neil [jamie at versado.net] wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I've been given the problem of integrating a new supplier into an
> existing IC5 store, but they (the supplier) have laid down some rather
> strict (and odd) ground rules which include:
>
> 1) We are not allowed to display the price of their products anywhere
> in the store apart from the basket and checkout. So in order to see
> how much something is then a customer must add the item to their
> basket.
>
> 2) We are not allowed to display their products next to products from
> other manufacturers.
>
> I've tried telling them (and the store owners) that they are crazy,
> but the supplier is sticking to their line and won't budge an inch.
> They haven't been able to do this in the US for various reasons (I
> supect legal ones), so this is for EU markets only.
>
> The problem is that this supplier is _very_ prestigious and it's
> considered worthwhile to jump through any number of hoops just to be
> able to sell their stuff.
>
> My current plan is this:
>
> 1) Create a "sub shop" dedicated to their products -
> http://domain.com/supplier/
>
> 2) Create a separate table for holding their products.
>
> 3) Limit _all_ searches in the rest of the store (IC and SQL) to using
> the main products table only. I'm using action maps for a lot of IC
> searches at the moment so I'm hoping this should be fairly easy.
>
> 4) Limit searches in the sub shop to using the new product table.
>
> 5) Make components intelligent enough to know which bit of the store
> they are being displayed in and use the correct products table.
>
> Can anyone shoot any holes in this plan or suggest a better approach?


If it were me I would just use the main products table and give it a switch
field like for_shop where blank is main shop and 1, 2, 3... can be any number
of custom areas of that shop.

If the store has tabbed navigation, like amazon, maybe this vendor could have
it's own tab, so it would be the "Prestigious Store". Depending on the product
and the prices you are offering you could do a "too low to show" price like
buy.com. I think amazon does this as well, where you would not find out the
price until it is added to the cart.

In short you have not presented any reason why you should go through the
trouble of using an additional products table. KISS

Components would be easy, just make your flypage based on 'for_shop' or
somesuch identifier... I believe it is "PageSelectField  foo" for that. That is
ofcourse if you not already doing that. That new flypage can pull in whatever
components it wants.

As for other customizations you could build a table to track what to pull in,
what not to, or as I do very often, use the 'for_shop' field to append or
prepend the pulling in of files... like  foo/bar/[scratch for_shop]submenu or
whatever, as in an include, etc. This also has a side affect of defaulting to
'submenu' if for some reason for_shop is missing.

There are really so many ways to do it. But I will say this, KISS, it always
eventually ends up that way, so keep it simple now and save yourself some
trouble. I cannot tell you how many times I have rebuilt a harebrained function
into something simple and elegant.

I have assumed that you are able to show their products next to other
manufactures products in the cart/checkout.

Paul