Hello,
I am in the process of transitioning an existing business that runs on a proprietary eCommerce solution written in Microsoft VB and ASP.net to an open solution such as Zen Cart and am looking for advice and/or professional services assistance.
Our basic business requirements are as follows:
- We sell books and related products to primary schools and teachers. Our book are by 20 or so authors with who our business has established publishing agreements. The business has had its own warehouse and fulfillment operations in the past but we will be changing/streamlining the entire operations moving forward, moving to an on demand publishing model and low or no inventory except for exclusive, high volume products.
- We want to offer products including books that customers can either purchase and download digitally or order as "on demand" boods to be produced either by lulu.com or the booksurge.com division of Amazon.
- We also want offer "common" products sold by Amazon and need to integrate through their SOAP APIs. I am not sure whether Amazon affiliate sales can be handled through our own cart vs. simply linking the customer to a branded Amazon storefront. This would be less practical and desirable for the customer so using our own is highly preferential.
- We will also sell products which our suppliers drop ship and or use a fulfillment service such as Amazon or shipwise.com to manage inventory and order fulfillment for products we intend to keep in stock. This would also require another level of integration so that our suppliers and fulfillment house receive order data and can return order status and shipment tracking.
- I have investigated Amazon's storefront solution as well as their partner Ecommerce4Everyone, but neither of these solutions looks like it can handle the product catalog, e-delivery and on demand book order management requirements of our business model.
The basic challenge is whether or not Zen Cart can handle these business requirements and how to integrate between Amazon to sell their products and ours without forcing our customer to choose between 1 cart or another.
If anybody here has experience and/or ideas on how this project could most easily achieved, I'd highly value your input.