[ic] Interchange, Is it right for me?

Doug Alcorn interchange-users@lists.akopia.com
Mon Jul 9 02:09:00 2001


i'll take a stab at this.  i would like to preface, that this seems
like a fairly large project to me.  others might find it easier and
have simpler solutions.  standard disclaimer, ymmv.

"Jason Osborne" <jason@sohonetworks.cc> writes:

> They do not want an e-commerce site that allows customers to
> purchase their product online because the sales reps in the company
> manipulate the price for each customer to sell them the
> product. They do however need a system that integrates a payment
> gateway, accounting software such as quicken, an inventory system,
> and a shipping system together. They want an easy to use intranet
> site that allows the rep to enter the price for a product that the
> customer has agreed to pay, insert the customer's information and
> authorize payment via credit card and online check, allow the
> customer to visit their site and check the status of the shipment,
> keep inventory current, and print shipping labels for ups.

This seems like a tall order.  IC isn't designed for inventory
management.  In fact, there are only hooks for inventory checking in
the 4.6 demo.  Probably the best/easiest thing to do is synchronize IC
with an external inventory management system periodically.  what i
mean is to have the inventory software export a file daily (or twice a
day or whatever) that IC can use to update it's inventory levels.
Also, use your external accounting software to decrement your
inventory levels.  Again, IC doesn't really have the "right stuff" for
doing honest to goodness inventory managment.

I would think of IC as more of a point-of-sale type software rather
than enterprise resource planning software.  As long as the other
pieces of your pie have an external interface you can force IC to work
with them.  Preferably this would be done with perl.

> On the admin side, the managers will need the ability to determine
> sales for each rep, group, and company. Data for each sale will need
> to be kept in case a charge back occurs, they will need to integrate
> this with a accounting package, and be able to set a minimum price
> for each item.

Save for the integration with the accounting software, this is all
merely work.  I've never heard of IC integrating with _any_ accounting
package.  If you have heard of IC integrating with Quickbooks, that
would be cool.  And, I'm not the final authority on this.  I typically
only scan the mailing list; I don't read all the posts.

> Q #1: Can Interchange link with current UPS software to allow
> printing of shipping labels after a credit card has been verified?

I don't think so.  I've never heard of any linux software or web api
for doing this.  do you know of any perl modules that will do this?

> Q #2: Can Interchange be setup so that the customer only sees
> information about a product and the online ordering can only be seen
> on an Intranet by the sales reps?

This (and several other questions below) would be done by giving every
rep a login.  Then on the pages, you could conditionally display
information based on the username/group.  Note that I don't really
think IC has user groups.  You would need to add that in (it wouldn't
be that hard, it's just another field on ther userdb).

> Q #3: Can fields be added to the checkout page so that the customer
> service rep can specify his or her name and can data that is
> obtained from each order be processed so that managers can look at
> each persons' sales?

yes.  in fact, you could do this automatically based on the above
mentioned username.

> Q #4: What type of accounting packages will integrate with
> Interchange besides QuickBooks?

no experience here; sorry.  IC can integrate with external
applications just using good old fashioned cronjobs/perl scripts.  you
could actually modify/override the internals of IC to do the
integration also.  as far as accounting packages go, i have no
experience with what types of hooks they have for external programs to
use.

> Q #5: Can the price of each product be manipulated on the checkout
> page by the rep and can this price that is entered be checked
> against a set price to make sure the rep does not go to low?

yes. IC does error checking/post-processing of pages using an mv_check
routine.  you could modify the basket page so that the price field is
editible and then use the mv_check to verify the amount.

> Q #5: What payment gateway do you recommend and would anyone be
> willing to provide/sell the code for this gateway to me?

IC started out with cybercash interface.  i think other have had
success with several others such as authorize.net.

> Q #6: Do you see any potential problems I might run into during this
> project?

Your biggest headache will be the integration with other packages.  I
don't know of any strong open source packages for inventory management
or accounting (gnucash is really only designed for personal use).
That means you will need proprietary software for those two pieces
that may or may not have well defined interfaces to external
packages.   Like I said above, IC isn't an ERP.  It excels at doing
order fulfillment and that's about it.

> Q #7: Do you recommend using Interchange 4.6.x or would you
> recommend using 4.7-8.x?

That depends largely only your catalog.  the 4.[78].x stuff has some
nice product matrixes.  I haven't used them, but i understand it's
nice for having template items and then many subitems that just
override one or two of the template's fields.  4.6 is perfectly fine
if you have a pretty flat catalog (ie your items are fairly unique
that fit into one level of categorization).  if you need multiple
levels of categories it gets a little more interesting.

-- 
 (__) Doug Alcorn (mailto:doug@lathi.net http://www.lathi.net)
 oo / PGP 02B3 1E26 BCF2 9AAF 93F1  61D7 450C B264 3E63 D543
 |_/  If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're
      free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait.