[ic] Deciding between Interchange and Miva (Questions)

[J P]

Hi all,

I've been reviewing e-commerce packages for a store I
want to open and I have pretty much narrowed down my
choices to Interchange and Miva.  I was hoping I could
ask a few questions here to help me decide.  Basically
I'm interested in opinions from folks who have
actually used both products.  I realize cost is one
major difference, but I'd like to ignore that for now
and find the best product.  

For a quick outline of what I'm doing, the shop I'm
getting ready to get going on is a sports shop with
NFL, NHL etc... stuff.  There will need to be multiple
levels of categories (ie, apparel -> mens -> shirts)
and different ways of sorting ie (product categories,
leagues, teams, players, events, etc.) and multiple
vendors.   I want to start slow with a few products
and slowly continue to add products/vendors.  Some
vendors I will buy direct from and handle shipping and
others will drop ship.  Later on I want to add things
like an affiliate program and a "members" area where
people can customize preferences, track past orders,
set birthday reminders and such.  It will initially
run on FreeBSD/MySQL, although that may change to
Linux next year, and running on our own servers. 
Also, from going through the mailing list archive, I'm
figuring to start with 4.8.6 since 4.9.3 doesn't seem
to be 100% production stable yet, although I really
like some of the new features in there, including
mod_perl.

1. How steep is the learning curve on this?  I have
heard it's pretty high.  I have some perl/mysql
background and a programmer I work with who has a lot
more.  I've worked with programs using Template
Toolkit and have some familiarity with that, which
seems somewhat similar to how templates are used here.

2. How easy is it to switch from one to the other, ie.
if I decide on one and find it wasn't the right one
for me, can the data be converted relatively easily
from/to interchange/miva.

3. Is there some sort of repository for additional
modules where I can find add-ons that aren't part of
the core package (ie, like mvcool.com or
mvcentral.com)

4. Is there an expected time frame when 4.9.3 will
become stable? 

5. Can products be in more than one category?  And can
there be additional levels of product
groups/categories... In the demo I see product group
which appears to be the first level of grouping, then
category, which appears to be a subgrouping of product
group.

6. I didn't see anything in the demo for importing
products.  Is there a facility to do this and can it
handle both full imports (for updating everything on
the site) and incremental imports (for just adding new
products)?  And is it as simple as creating a text
file, uploading and running an import program?

7. I don't quite get the concept of having multiple
catalogs vs subcatalogs.  Ultimately where I want to
go is to have multiple stores (is that catalogs?) and
within at least the main store, let vendors have
access to their product data and reporting (is this a
subcatalog).  

8. Is is possible to have different templates for
different categories.. for example in all of hockey it
might use one template and another for football... and
then say on the teams areas, it might use different
css files for team colors and such?

9. How hard is it to add fields to various tables to
be used either in the user side or the admin side or
both?  For example, let's say I wanted to add a cost
field that I can add to reports in the admin?  Or
options fields for products?  Or say a vendor id or
additional features for more product information?

10. And this is for later too, but can I create a
separate "store" if you will, where anyone can
register to add products (become a vendor) and have a
marketplace like at amazon, based on the same category
structure and stuff.  I'm thinking for folks to sell
their own stuff, used stuff, whatever... Has anyone
done anything like that where I could look at it?

Thx for all the help anyone can provide me... I really
do appreciate it.


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