Advice required...

[Jim Riley]

We currently have one V7 Business Actinic catalog (www.tutor2u.net/acatalog/shop.html).

As our product range expands and deepens, we want to be able to host versions of the range on other web sites, like retail concessions - sometimes solus (i,e, separate domain); sometimes as separate sections of other websites that we own or partner with. lets call these - tutor2u satellite shops.

For some of these solus or satellite shops, we will want to offer the full range; for others just a specialised selection.

We would like to be able to download orders into the base Actinic application and deal with them centrally using the Mole End suite (superb).

So - is Developer the answer? Does Developer handle this kind of arrangement? Or is there an alternative solution?

Jim
www.tutor2u.net

[Jan]

Hello Jim,

Thanks for the kind words about Mole End :-)

Developer will allow you to create and manage as many shops as you like on a single machine. Each shop will run independantly from the others, so you will upload each one separately and you will download orders into a separate shop. You can use our product replication tool to link products between stores and keep stock levels and the key product fields the same between each store. So in some ways you have what you need. You can use our One Stop Automation with the Multisite module to collect orders from each shop and update stock levels if you have any products with stock control enabled. You can also use our One Stop Order Processing tool to process orders in each shop and switch between sites easily (this isn't a huge sales pitch - Jim is a Mole End Subscriber).

You will only have a problem if you need all orders to be processed in a single Actinic shop, to do this you would have to create and upload your micro stores using developer and then rather than downloading into each store just copy the *.ord files into a central store and download from there instead - you could probably set up something to do this automatically for you. There are benefits to having all orders together because you can then analyse all sales from Actinic and it should in theory be quicker to process orders because they will all be in a single place (although you might be able to set something to tell you where they came from), however you might loose knowledge in that you might not know where an order originated and you won't be able to brand invoices etc for each store.

Regards,

[Mike Hughes]

Jan,

Can you really copy the .ord files into a central store and download from there? Isn't this going to cause all kinds of problems with order numbers ?

Mike

[Jim Riley]

The V7 Business Advanced User guide talks about using javascript to create sections/lists of an actinic store that can be viewed on other webs sites. Is that relevant here?

jim

[smiffy]

I have a PC dedicated to downloading orders and use the ME tool to automate the downloading and data entry pritning.

What you could also do is just import your network settings for store two into store 1 (on your order processing PC) and then do the download different sites into one store. (This would make it a lot easier to find order when customer phone in - though each site has a different number order sequence)

It would be nice (Jan - hint, hint) if there was a way to have the automation mole change the network setting for you.

I actually that the same site on differnt URL's but you have to be careful that you do not accidentily upload the wrong site to the wrong url. It have been done!

[Jan]

You can copy the *.ord files over, but it is wise to set up the order numbers on each site so that they don't overlap (eg. site 1 starts from1, site 2 starts from 10000, etc).

Hint taken Gary, it would be fairly easy (but scarey) to change the network settings but then you would have to get the mole to upload the same site x times. I will ponder on it though.

Cheers,

[smiffy]

I was thinking of something that could perhaps be run from the command line :-


MEnd /site1name /site1settings /upload

or

MEnd /site1 /site1settings /download
then
MEnd /site1 /site2settings /download
etc etc

[Mike Hughes]

I didn't realise you could do this.

Smiffy, for some reason your signature link is messed up. You could try using <a href></a> instead of <url> or if that doesn't work I'm sure jan can tell us how to it.

Mike