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Re: Best open source e-commerce options?

We've finished a few more shops at work in recent months, including some Shopify ones. What we learned there was that Shopify is a very capable solution, provided you can adapt your requirements to the way Shopify works. We sadly have had a customer that insisted on using Shopify, but came with loads of requirements for which we needed to force shopify to work in ways it wasn't really designed for. In the end, we got it to work, but it would have cost that particular customer a lot less if he had gone for a Shopware (or magento2) solution because that kind of platforms give you more freedom if you need it.

There was a paypal integration with oledrion at the time, but I don't think it will still work without change.

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Re: Best open source e-commerce options?

Our current payments processor does tax calculation based on the delivery address. The challenge is creating the shop to match up with the product list and get the transaction completed.

I haven't looked deeply at oledrion, knowing the link from the shop to the payments side is going to be the trick, along with getting tax calculated properly.

After exploring a bit more, I am leaning towards Shopify and creating a shop on a subdomain to preserve all the SEO juice we've built up and to ease the full entry to online shop and pay without our interaction.

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Re: Best open source e-commerce options?

Hi @Steve, I was wondering if your payment provider does offer tax calculations? My current knowledge only covers services that are active in Western Europe at the moment, so I don't know about US-based payment or shipping enablers.

Have you had the chance to review oledrion? I know it's old, so probably a refactoring is really necessary, but would it work for you in its current state?



Re: Best open source e-commerce options?

yeah, the only thing that shows the final price with all the taxes included is fuel - when you put gas in your car, the price on the pump includes it all.

There are online services that just do tax tracking and updating. Fortunately for us, nothing we have changes taxability based on location, only the amount changes. It isn't difficult for us to do, just trying to reduce the friction of the customer having to wait for someone to do the calculations and get back to them to finalize payments. Not the 1-click checkout people are becoming accustomed to.



Re: Best open source e-commerce options?

I think the tax thing is a perfect case to throw at a specialised web service. Not only do you have to develop the functionality, you also need to make sure you stay on top of changing legislation and such. We are seeing the same issues now in Europe, now that governments have seen the big cauldron of tax money hidden in online sales somewhere. Every country in the European Union has VAT tax, but they all apply different percentages for different types of goods.

One thing I noticed last time I was with you in the States (too long ago, we're looking into a new trip with our girls this time in the next few years), is that your shops don't show the final price, tax included. In Europe, the full price must be shown in shops (even online ones) so there are different pricing strategies : either you keep the final price the same, and countries with lower tax in essence pay more for the goods, either you vary prices depending on the rate of the country. But it's a hassle in any case.



Re: Best open source e-commerce options?

Thanks! I had forgotten about oledrion. I'll have a look at it and see what we can do with it.

You're right - I'm not looking for a catalog of even 50 items, probably more like 10 - 15 at this point. The challenge we face hear in the US is the variety of tax jurisdictions, all based on the point of delivery. That's why I was looking for something that already has tackled that aspect of things.



Re: Best open source e-commerce options?

I am now working at https://www.meteor.be and what we do is create e-commerce shops based on Shopware (mostly, we also do shopify, but that's not really relevant for this case as it's PaaS and not open source).

Next to that, I am also on loan to our sister firm PHPro where I manage a fairly large magento2 website.

Both Shopware and Magento2 are monsters : Their codebase is tens of times that of ImpressCMS, and it takes more or less 9-12 months to set up a shop from start to finish with all the customisations that a customer normally requests.

Shopware 6 is the new kid on the block (Shopware 5 still runs a gazillion of sites, but wasn't API-first so it was rewritten from scratch and now SW6 has more or les 25% of the functionalites from its predecessor )

Fun fact : Shopware 5 used Smarty as templating engine.

But even with those gigantic ecosystems, in most cases we go for specialised services like https://www.firmhouse.com to setup subscriptions for recurring revenue.

Most of the large shops that we handle use a PIM, with a very popular one being Akeneo. And anyhow, in most cases we need to do a connection with an ERP that handles product definition, description, pricing, and stock information. That connection is one of the weak spots of any project. Another one is discounts. I couldn't have imagined the creativity of retailers in inventing everytime another complex set of rules for even more discount types. Each with their own exceptions of course. And the cherry on the cake is the payment provider integration. In Europe, Adyen is frequently used, with Mollie also very popular in Belgium-the Netherlands. We've been in dicussion with Adyen for months now because some parts of their Shopware module don't work as expected.

I take it you're not looking at offering a catalog of a few thousand items online, so Magento or Shopware would be overkill. But, I have been thinking of resurrecting the oledrion module based on the knowledge I have gathered until now.

A big weakness in both Magento2 and Shopware, even with hundreds of millions of venture capital behind them : they suck at handling content htat isn't a product or a category description. Shopware has an elasticsearch running, but you can't search for keywords in 'blog' pages. The same with Magento. And several of our clients got the remark from the SEO guys and gals that there simply wasn't enough text on their product pages for Google to index, so their SEO would suffer. So blog content really is important.

So in that respect, ImpressCMS + oledrion would do a much better job



Re: Best open source e-commerce options?

And - what about recurring revenue and digital content?



Best open source e-commerce options?

I'm curious what others have tried, abandoned, really find useful - and is there a module that we can use or adapt and improve? Didn't Simon have a catalog module? What other options - OpenCart? Magento? WooCommerce?



Roadmap on github

As a temporary link, the roadmap for the next few releases can be found here : Milestones - ImpressCMS/impresscms (github.com)

This is a temporary measure, as I try to get a better integration with Github into the site, and we will need to apply the versions more rigorously to the tickets that we have. But it's a start (and every begin is difficult).



Re: New installation page for ImpressCMS v2

A new version of the page is live, with the fast installation rewritten. We now do everything using composer.



Re: ImpressCMS 1.4.2 is released!

And the Softaculous build has been updated to 1.4.2 as well here. No easier way to give ImpressCMS 1.4.2 a spin if your hosting provider offers Softaculous support!



Re: ImpressCMS 1.4.2 Release Candidate is released

The RC has become a final release - see the news and download!



ImpressCMS 1.4.2 Release Candidate is released

Hi,

I just released ImpressCMS 1.4.2 RC. Lots of small bugfixes, most of them security-related. Please have a look and see if it works on your system in your situation. Any bugs? post them on Github, or you can add them here in this forum post as well

Release 1.4.2 Release Candidate · ImpressCMS/impresscms (github.com)



New installation page for ImpressCMS v2

Hi,

I started an installation page for ImpressCMS v2 to help you out if you want to test the current v2.0 alpha builds. I received feedback that the installation is not that clear, so here is a page that should help out. Feel free to add/adapt where needed : Installing ImpressCMS 2 - Wiki : ImpressCMS



ImpressCMS, SSL and Cloudflare Free

<p>I setup my ImpressCMS site using a <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/">Let's Encrypt SSL certificate</a>. Everything works fine, nothing specific to configure other than putting 'https' in your root url. The site was running a bit sluggish, due to the server being on the other end of the world, so I decided to activate the free Cloudflare option my hosting company offered.</p>

<p>After that, once Cloudflare was up and running, my site was unreachable due to 'the site redirecting in an incorrect way'. Because the site has been working without issue before, I figured it was the cloudflare setup that needed adapting.</p>

<p>I found <a href="https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170536-How-do-I-redirect-all-visitors-to-HTTPS-SSL-">this article on the cloudflare support site</a> that explains what was happening : my site was SSL-only, but the cloudflare default setting is for 'Flexible SSL'. The Flexible SSL option acts as a SSL proxy between your users and your site, and can be a good option if you don't have the opportunity to run your site with an SSL certificate, but you want to expose an SSL address to the world. Cloudflare then exposes a HTTPS address to the outside world, but communicates with your servers without it.</p>

<p>Changing the option from 'Flexible SSL' to 'Full SSL' immediately fixed the issue for me. Site response times have improved considerably since then.</p>



Re: login to custom php app using icms login credential ?

<p>As a follow-up on this, you could implement this using a OAuth2 server, where the OAuth2 server lets the user login in your ImpressCMS site, and then notify your other webapp that the user is verified. That means custom development on both sides, and i don't think that this has been attempted before for an ImpressCMS site.&nbsp;</p>

<p>This would be the most flexible solution, in the likes of logging in with Twitter, Google, Microsoft or Facebook into a site.</p>



Re: login to custom php app using icms login credential ?

<p>I totally agree with @skenow. This way you don't need to duplicate the login procedure in ImpressCMS, and you can still use the existing userbase.</p>

<p>&nbsp;</p>



Re: login to custom php app using icms login credential ?

<p>So - you want to have your login be the login from your ImpressCMS site, with all their users and passwords, and the rest of the content be restricted, but not an icms site?</p>

<p>Then, each of your pages must check for a valid user, like your ICMS site does (icms::$user is set and meets your criteria).</p>

<p>To access this information, the easiest way I see is to require mainfile.php in all your pages, which will give you a connection to the db that holds the users and the salt key stored in the trust path to complete the authorization.</p>



login to custom php app using icms login credential ?

<p>Hi</p>

<p>i would like to build a custom php application without using icms but i would like to use icms user/password from&nbsp;<br />
user table to login to my system&nbsp;</p>

<p>is there any code script out there that i can use</p>




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